One of the key tasks of an effective and modern CMO is to coordinate the company’s efforts around creating good experiences for consumers. This is a big and difficult challenge, therefore more and more concepts are being developed to approach the experience in a more organized way.
John Maeda, author of many books on design and currently serving as Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient, proposes a simple L.E.A.D. framework for good experience in the digital world:
• Light – light and fast
• Ethical – built ethically with respect for consumer data and privacy
• Accessible – easy and natural to use
• Dataful – based on data
This concept draws attention to two extremely important issues that are increasingly in the focus of CMOs and at the same time are strongly interrelated.
Data is becoming a key tool to better customise and personalise experiences, especially in the digital area. It is precisely for this reason that marketing executives are entering into key roles or becoming leaders in the data-driven transformation.
At the same time, the growing scale of data use raises the important issue of data use ethics. John Maeda says straightforwardly that in the digital world it is extremely easy to fall into the trap of building personalized experiences in an unethical way. Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal, a company that has invested heavily in building a “data-driven” approach, also states that “data ethics and algorithmic ethics are key challenges for the digital economy.”
The relevance of this issue to CMOs is confirmed by a recent study by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). 74% of marketing executives believe that data-driven ethics will become much more important to their role in the next 5 years, and they already see the issue growing in importance within their company’s boardroom. At the same time, only 48% of the surveyed companies have an official data ethics policy. 82% of the CMOs surveyed said that they would decide to leave a company that unethically uses data, and 26% said that they have already put their careers in a position of discomfort associated with using data for marketing purposes.
Together with the report, the WFA publishes a set of guidelines for companies that want to go beyond the simple application of GDPR regulations, which can be downloaded from this link:
https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/2020/06/01/WFA-launches-worlds-first-guide-on-data-ethics-for-brands
The issue of ethical use of data will increasingly become a key pillar in building good consumer experience. Marketing directors naturally play the role of leaders in this area in their organisations, actively building a data-driven transformation.
