Chapter 3: We want to paint ourselves into a corner
Trust by design, by philosophy, by intent, by our every action and deed. This is The Profila Promise.
One of the frustrating downsides of modern life is that certain words have been rendered almost meaningless because of overuse or, more often, misuse.
Sadly, trust is one of those words. Nowadays, trust is a marketing word. It’s thrown into taglines and campaigns and keynote speeches. CEOs talk endlessly about it and politicians try to leverage it into their own branded currency.
But trust isn’t as much earned as it is an accumulation of sentiment built up over time, but potentially lost in a heartbeat.
Think of it as a balloon that has air added to it by both parties in a relationship. Each positive interaction that holds to the promise of the relationship adds a bit more air to the balloon. Minor incidents which drain some of the air can be tolerated, as long as the balloon is well inflated by past trust-building activities.
There is ample evidence (that seems to accumulate daily) that trust in our various institutions - our governments, the media, and big business - is at an all-time low, and for good reason. Trust has been squandered. While the words of these actors promised one thing, their actions achieved something decidedly different.
At Profila, we have a great appreciation for the challenge we face, being an unknown company in a world of giants. We were not born from a famous conversation in a San Francisco coffee shop. We aren’t disgruntled members of the old guard who wanted to come back and seize the castle for ourselves. And we aren’t graduates of some great networked universities with all the access and connections that bring to the table.
Profila was started by an immigrant in Switzerland (Shawn Jensen from South Africa) and joined by a young data protection attorney at the heart of the European experiment (Michiel Van Roey in Belgium), and then joined by another immigrant to Switzerland (myself from the US). Because of this, we don’t have any legacy paradigm to protect, no cultural ethos to restrict our thinking, and we have no loyalty to the current masters of the universe.
We are outsiders in every definition of the word, in our daily lives and in our vision of what is so desperately needed in the world; a reworking of the balance of power between individuals and those who wish to engage us in commerce or provide us with information, services, and products.
Our solution to the challenge of earning and maintaining your trust is to openly and concretely declare our values, our intentions and the promise of the platform we are building. And then perpetually live up to them.
Only by doing this will people learn that Profila is different because we were born that way. We were designed that way, from the beginning.
Trust by design, by philosophy, by intent, by our every action and deed.
Our promise to every human being who joins the Profila platform
We will never sell the content of your Profila to anyone. Never ever. For any purpose.
We will never barter it.
We will never auction it.
We will never trade it.
We will never exchange it.
We will never share it.
We will never swap it.
We will never traffic it.
We will never deal it.
We will never fence it.
We will never bootleg it.
We will never sell it (no harm in repeating ourselves).
What we will do is empower you to create the most accurate, authentic, and valuable representation of yourself and make you the absolute dictatorial gatekeeper on which brands and organizations have access to aspects of your Profila:
- for a specific length of time (and renewable)
- for remuneration (brands currently pay someone else for your data, so why not just cut out the middleman?).
And that consent is revocable with one tap or click on our platform.
We have an almost unlimited supply of ambitious ideas and features to add to your arsenal of agency and sovereignty, and in all of these ideas, our promise will hold steady and fast.
Our promise to every brand, company, or other kind of organization who joins Profila
We’re going to help you get out of your own way. The current paradigm of customer relations and marketing incentivizes bad behavior. It also measures the wrong things (and the things that are not the most valuable to know).
We understand that it’s what’s currently available to you and there’s no alternative. Until there is one.
We will continue in our mission in developing the best platform for zero-party data anywhere; evergreen from its source, unmatched in its quality, with an eye on creating new and impactful data and insight products.
But to get access to any of these gold nuggets, you have to play by the rules.
And we’ll be baking in the enforcement of your customers’ rules — for what aspects of their Profila you can access, what you can do with the insights, and how/how often you can communicate with them.
When you come on board the Profila platform, you are entering a realm with a set of expected behaviors (which will ultimately prove the most profitable to you):
- all data sharing is based on clear, transparent, and revocable consent.
- all communication cadence is determined by your customers, on their terms, for their benefit.
- all of these individually-mandated rules will be enforced on the platform with ruthless effectiveness.
Our promise to you is a platform that will allow you to see your customers through their eyes, allow you to act upon it according to their stated preferences, and do so in a fully compliant way.
This is a much better paradigm on offer for you to engage and delight your customers:
- a lower cost of engagement (by matching the right message to the right person)
- better conversion (through insanely accurate micro-market segmentation)
- fully maximized customer retention and total-lifetime-value.
This is the better way.
A final word
We take our promises seriously and know the trust we will build with you is existential for our success.
So bookmark this page. Print it up and put it in that drawer you reserve for important papers. Turn this article into a PDF and put it on Dropbox so it’s backed up and in the cloud forever.
Hold us to account. Hold us to our promise. Keep us honest and scream from the mountaintops when we are not.
We’re in it to win it. And when we win, all of us win. And that only happens when we paint ourselves into a corner so we can never violate our principles, our vision, and our promise to you.
The Profila Promise.
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