What IKEA and BBC Have In Common

Caring For The User

Companies like IKEA and the BBC have started to distance themselves from a centralised data-driven approach, avoiding the simplified narrative: Data is Power and embracing the counter-intuitive strategy: Privacy is Power.

Until now, the internet has created a world of unreality to which users must submit their data and surrender their privacy as an inevitable tradeoff.

However, some digital strategists and leaders have started to care and challenge this view, elevating users as subjects whose choices, behaviours and intentions are inevitably entangled in emotions and feelings.

It is encouraging and incredibly inspiring to see what recognised brands like IKEA or BBC have begun to do, companies who are creating digital products designed for the user as opposed to products that aspire to turn users into products.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1MsEl9cTRc Where Barbara Martin Coppola presents IKEA Data Promise to give Privacy and Transparency to Users

Although privacy, trust and compliance are making the headlines everyday, very few leaders are addressing these complex issues, but those who are, like Barbara Coppola from IKEA, or Bill Thompson and Eleni Sharp from BBC have begun to redefine users as people whose thoughts and feelings are inseparable and whose sphere of privacy, online or offline holds equal rights.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2021-09-personal-data-store-research PDS Personal data stores: building and trialling trusted data services, BBC Research and Development’s personal data products lead Eleni Sharp and principal engineer Bill Thompson.

To continue to address the numbing of a user’s mind it is necessary to challenge not data itself, but all the considered perspectives and methods that passively accept that grabbing data and taking it away from the user is the only answer.

https://ohmypod.netlify.app/welcome Developed by Astrid Gamoneda Arruñada, from the WESO research group, in collaboration with empathy.co

The most extraordinary products out there were not reasoned or given in data, they originated in minds, no different to the minds of those who consume these products. Minds who decide if a product works or not on the basis of the feelings they evoke.

Achieving this blissful awareness of that which creates irresistible products requires that we keep data in-line as opposed to putting our minds in-line with data.

Companies like IKEA and BBC have started to embrace trust as a key core feeling that can be evoked. This will inspire many more.

Who does not care for privacy?