Decentralized Personalization in Marketing
Getting to Decentralized Personalization
According to the State of Martech 2023/24 research 74% of CMO’s believe that data is the fundamental piece to get to martech efficiencies. However, the biggest hurdles are time (58%) and skills (52%). A complex topic which requires skills and time for continuous data management. Additionally, legislation, regulators and privacy interest groups put pressure on existing centralized customer data efforts.
So, the question is:
Does fully centralized customer data still makes actual business sense?
Isn’t the better solution to strive for a decentralized approach? One that empowers users to control their data. Meanwhile lowering the costs for internal data management. Lower risks of substantial data privacy and security breaches. and provide better data for personalization needs.
Let’s break down how the current cycle and how it can be improved.
The current cycle
The current cycle looks something like this:
Get all data connected to a 360 record > hope it is somewhat correct > try to keep it fresh > apply black box AI model > hope it doesn’t totally miss its mark> feed back into 360 profile.
This is costing tons of money to set up. It takes even more to keep updated. There are huge privacy and security risks. Only getting worse by upcoming legislation and pressure by special interest groups. And even worse: ransom hackers.
It just doesn’t make sense for every company on the planet to know the home address, exact age, family situation and interests of their customers. And it is even worse if only a few big tech companies have it… looking at you Alphabet and Meta.
The new cycle
A new cycle could look something like this:
Get engagement, incentive and trust from customers > keep a light customer record, don’t keep attributes > ask to proof attributes when needed for particular actions (can be standard settings) > apply transparent AI model > incentivize customers to validate.
This provides for better, more accurate personalization. At lower costs to set up. And way lower costs to maintain and manage. It comes with less worry about privacy and security compliancy risks. Risks that can potentially destroy your company’s reputation, and your career.
All of this was quite impossible when we couldn’t make digital assets ownable. When we couldn’t incentivize without centrally keeping track of credits or so. But now we can. The technology is here to ask for permissions and offer incentives in near real-time.
Zero knowledge proofs let us validate what we absolutely need to be sure on. And there are different options to get temporary access to self-declared, self-earned data. Like wallets (Ethereum), pods (Solid), vaults (Nederlandse Datakluis) and bank accounts (PSD2). Preferably controlled by a self-governed identity.
