What happens if marketers cannot track their customers?

What should marketers do in the face of tightening customer privacy policy trends?

As the scandals about the misuse of customer information abound, like the T-mobile data breach, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach, and so on, governments across the world are rolling out policies to protect customers’ personal identification information (PII). Additionally, more and more high-tech companies are joining the rank of protecting their customers’ privacy. For example, to protect iPhone users’ personal information, Apple issued the new privacy tool — App Transparent Tracking (ATT) in 2021.

In such circumstances, the question is left to marketers — what should they do when it is becoming harder to collect customers’ information and big data become increasingly inaccurate?

Todays’ blog is going to talk about: 1. What do customers' privacy policies mean for customers, governments, and data-driven digital marketers? 2. My personal idea about how should data-driven marketers react in this situation.

My personal view on big data for digital marketers.

I believe that from a human as well as an ethical perspective, protecting consumer privacy has become a necessary need for social evolution. It’s true that consumer privacy policies have a huge impact on data-driven marketers. Especially in such a dynamic market, without the help of accurate data, marketers will be slow to respond to market demand. This also places a higher demand on the professionalism of marketers.

Without the help of accurate big data, what is left for marketers? I think that in this digital-driven era, marketers rely too much on the convenience provided by big data. When marketers find that they don’t know who their audience is and what their consumers want, they often turn to third-party data platforms and various consumer insights on the web to facilitate their understanding of consumers.

But such convenient and quick tools deceive marketers. Marketers often neglect to communicate directly with consumers — asking them what they expect from us, and what are the urgent needs we can give them? And these conversations with consumers can be done even without the support of big data — through their field, online surveys, and direct interviews with consumers.

In my opinion, the marketing major is more like a combination of social science and art science. The scientific side of it is that marketers need to reflect the realities of the market through rigorous and rational research to evaluate the final results of their marketing campaigns. On the other hand, the artistic side is to use or not use this data to reach an emotional resonance with consumers. And big data is only telling part of the story in the scientific aspect, but because of its convenience and practicality, it is overemphasized.

Marketing is a balance of art and science.