Paul Berney, CMO of Mobile Marketing Association, says that permission is going to be a huge part of marketing in future.
I have argued here before that contextual relevance is the USP of mobile. The ability to deal with customers as individuals based upon who they, where they are, when they are (time) and what they are doing (need state) makes the mobile channel unique. Through contextual relevance it might be argued that mobile is the channel that can finally fulfill on the promise of CRM.
But that potential relies on capturing, holding and using data about individuals; something that digital channels both enable and succeed through. Our desire as marketers to do this has lead to some predicting that we will become the biggest spenders on technology ahead of our colleagues in IT. (1)
However the general tone of European legislation (like the EU Privacy Directive) is towards ‘do not collect’: that is to say, do not collect and hold and data on individuals. Somewhat misleadingly many commentators are calling this ‘the cookie law’ but actually it refers to any form of tracking consumers online and this includes the mobile web and apps. Obviously as an industry mobile marketing is concerned about draconian interpretations of those laws. Equally obviously as a trade group the MMA is helping its members to argue in favour of a more measured approach to managing consumer data.
So the three words that we, as marketers need to start paying attention to are transparency, choice and notice.
We need to make the whole process of capturing consumer data transparent to them. We need to give them notice that we want to track them in some way and we need to offer consumers easy to use choice mechanism so that they can decide if they want to allow that tracking to take place.
The technology exists to allow us to offer consumers a much more sophisticated approach than just a blanket opt-in and opt-out. The choice mechanisms we offer in particular could allow consumers to change their level of consent based on individual brands or their individual context. Perhaps we might even allow them to control a dynamic opt-in; imagine a consumer turning on dynamic opt-in from selected brands and retailers when they arrived at a shopping mall and turning it off as they leave.
All of that points to the fact that permission is going to be a huge part of marketing in future. This is even more the case in the most personal of mediums, the mobile channel.
(1) forbes
