Five Strengths to Build Across Privacy & Personalization
by Lucian Lita and Margot Kimura
You may have heard of the condition called mirror muscle syndrome: it occurs when people focus on training the muscles that they can see in the mirror, like their abs, chest, and biceps, while neglecting the opposing back and leg muscles. This lopsided focus leads to muscle imbalances that result in terrible posture, pain, and performance plateau.
We’ve all seen the front-end/back-end imbalance in tech: the beautiful website that takes a full minute to load, the latest smart watch that can’t figure out that you got off the elliptical machine an hour ago, and the AI virtual assistant that can’t spell your name. These are all cases where companies have poured their efforts into what’s visible and neglected the other side of their products, leading to disappointed customers and missed sales.
leads to questionable results with serious long-term health implications.
With the rise of personalization, we now find ourselves with a new mirror muscle syndrome imbalance: between personalization and privacy. Personalization is what customers immediately see when they use your app or visit your website. It’s in the recommendations you offer, the ads you show, and the content you display. Privacy is the supporting back muscles to personalization — it’s what gives customers the sense of trust needed for them to share the data required for personalization to work. It’s what makes customers feel that your personalized services are delightful, and not creepy.
The stakes in this case are even higher: customers want both personalization and privacy, and they’re willing to pay for it. On the flip side, not complying with regulations that protect privacy, such as GDPR, can lead to massive fines, and customers are ditching companies they don’t trust.
Traditionally, investment in data privacy has lagged behind investment in personalization, because companies were not incentivized to care about data privacy. This is no longer the case. In the US, GDPR-like legislation is being proposed by multiple members of Congress and industry, and is also considered by the White House. In India, a new data privacy law is being drafted as well. It’s time to get serious about privacy.
The first step in every improvement program is to “recognize that there is a problem.” To help you figure out if you have a gap in privacy, personalization, or both, we’ve devised a simple test that is independent of company maturity, size, and vertical: the five-point muscle test.
The Five-Point Muscle Test
We’ve defined five “muscles” (qualities) to focus on, where you need to be “strong” in both data privacy and personalization. The examples below will help you assess your current strength. As you follow along, circle the box in each column that best describes where your business is now.
#1 Automation: Technology is supposed to automate repetitive tasks
… so let it.
#2 Robustness: Technology can be overwhelmed, fail, or be attacked.
Are you prepared?
#3 Timeliness: There’s a minimum speed to play.
#4 Transparency: Everyone knows what’s going on — no surprises.
#5 Security: Claiming privacy without security is like using a screen door as an airlock on a spaceship.
So, how’d you do?
Is your Privacy as strong as your Personalization? Are you balanced across your muscles, or do you have mirror muscle syndrome?
If you’re strong in both privacy and personalization across all five muscles — Bravo! You are one of a small number of companies who really know what they’re doing. Amazon is less likely to be eating your lunch anytime soon and your users will thank you for protecting their data.
If you find that you’re not as strong as you’d like across any of these muscles, in either privacy or personalization, invest now to bridge the gap and find your balance. Consider getting experienced outside help. In weightlifting, progress comes much faster and more easily with a knowledgeable personal trainer at your side. The same goes for tech.
Final Thoughts
Privacy and personalization are fundamentally related because both require a smart data platform that is automated, robust, timely, transparent, and secure.
Businesses have typically invested more in personalization because of the obvious incentives they see in the mirror, like higher engagement and better conversion rates. With increased scrutiny and changes in the privacy landscape, businesses with mirror muscle syndrome are hitting a performance plateau, as customers leave or withhold their data, due to lack of trust. In order to push past this plateau, businesses need to strengthen their privacy “muscles”, by investing in equivalent capabilities to personalization.
When both privacy and personalization are strong, customers are happy and willing to share their data, which improves your product, and sets up a virtuous cycle that generates increased revenue, customer loyalty, and brand recognition.
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Yoyo Labs is a premier Data & AI consulting firm. We specialize in building custom, state-of-the-art, high-impact data solutions. Our clients span verticals (Advertising, FinTech, Healthcare, Social, Manufacturing, Mental Health, etc.) and sizes (nonprofits and startups to Fortune 100). We care about product and we bring our deep data expertise and a relentless quality focus to bear. The more complex, large scale, intractable, gnarly data product problem you have, the better! It’s right up our alley. Talk to us! We can help.
About the Authors
Lucian Lita is founder of Yoyo Labs, previously founder of Level Up Analytics and data leader at BlueKai, Intuit, and Siemens Healthcare.
Margot Kimura is Lead Data Scientist at Yoyo Labs, previously a principal investigator of cybersecurity and decision-making products for the federal government at Sandia National Laboratories.
