Unlocking Hyper-Personalisation While Enhancing Privacy
The promise of personalisation has been with us for a long time – digital enabled ‘one-to-one marketing’ was the darling of the dot-com boom. In truth, we are still waiting for the promise to be achieved. Businesses strive to provide tailored experiences to their customers, aiming to meet their individual needs and preferences.
However, personalisation requires information about the individual: their personal data. So, many programs stumble upon a significant roadblock: Privacy. From consumer concerns, to data regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and the power of gatekeepers like Google, it appears that personalisation and privacy are in conflict. At least until now. Enter ‘Private Personalisation.’
The Paradox of Personalisation and Privacy
To Paraphrase Dan Ariely:
Personalisation
~ Dan Ariely (mostly)big datais like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
OK, so maybe the situation isn’t quite as desperate, but it’s close. For decades, hyper-personalisation has been the ‘next-destination’ buzzword in marketing. The idea is simple yet compelling: offer customers products and services that align with their unique preferences, the jobs that they need to be done, and you’ll win their loyalty. However, as businesses have gathered more customer data to fuel personalisation efforts, privacy concerns have escalated.
Consumers grow wary of the data they share online. High-profile data breaches and misuse of personal information have eroded trust. As a result, regulatory bodies worldwide are introducing stringent data protection laws, with GDPR leading the way in Europe, followed by dozens of states worldwide, plus fourteen US states (as of publication), with more set to follow. These regulations are designed to empower consumers with more control over their data, emphasising transparency and consent.
This has created a paradox for marketers. On one hand, marketers need customer data to personalise experiences effectively. On the other hand, they have to navigate a landscape where privacy is paramount, and they are less able to provide the personalised solutions that their customers expect. With the use of Human Data becoming harder, the promise of personalisation is moving further out of reach.
It is clear that a new approach is needed to reconcile these seemingly conflicting objectives and deliver what everyone wants, by doing it the right way.
Private Personalisation: The Solution
Private Personalisation is a revolutionary approach that reimagines how businesses can achieve hyper-personalisation while enhancing privacy and working in harmony with data regulations. At its core, it leverages two key elements: in-app personal data stores and in-app personal intelligence. Its outputs are Zero-Party Data which unlocks what we call Omni-Personal Marketing. This is marketing that serves customers both precisely and confidentially in their real-time context.
In-App Personal Data Stores
Imagine a scenario where every customer carries their own personal data vault within your existing customer app. This vault enables them to store information such as preferences, purchase history, and behavioural patterns. Crucially, this data is securely held on the customer’s device, not in a centralised database vulnerable to breaches.
Customers have full control over their data. They choose what to gather and share, while being encrypted and protected. This approach aligns perfectly with the principles of data protection regulations like GDPR & CCPA. It puts consumers in the driver’s seat, ensuring their data is safe and used only as they see fit.
In-App Personal Intelligence
When customers own their data, they can also leverage it for personalisation. In-app Personal intelligence utilises advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to analyse data stored in the customer’s vault. The insights gained enable the app to offer hyper-personalised actions, recommendations, offers and experiences; all orchestrated through participation with the brand.
Crucially, this intelligence remains within the confines of the customer’s device. It never accesses or shares data outside the app, preserving complete confidentiality. It’s like having a personal shopper who knows your preferences but never discloses them to anyone else.
The Benefits of Private Personalisation
The advantages of adopting Private Personalisation are manifold:
1. Trust and Transparency
By empowering customers with control over their data, businesses build trust and transparency. Customers feel more comfortable sharing information when they know it’s securely stored and used only for their benefit.
2. Enhanced Personalisation
In-app personal intelligence provides customers and the brand with a deeper understanding of their preferences and the jobs that they need to be done, enabling businesses to offer more accurate and relevant recommendations in the real-time context of their lives. At DataSapien, we’ve shown that this increases short-term customer delight and lifetime customer value.
3. Regulatory Compliance
Staying on the right side of data protection regulations is crucial. Private Personalisation ensures that businesses comply with GDPR and the burgeoning number of related supra-national, national and state level laws, while still delivering tailored experiences.
4. Data Security
With customer data residing on customer devices, the risk of large-scale data breaches of sensitive Personally Identifiable information (PII) is significantly reduced. Distributing PII on millions of securely encrypted personal devices turns the economics of dark web hacking on its head, removing the ‘hack-once’ honeypot. Whats more, leaving the PII at-rest on device, and moving the intelligence to the data (safely encrypted on the device), dramatically reduces attack vectors. In combination, this approach massively reduces customer and organisation risk – it imbues trust.
5. Improved Customer Engagement
Private Personalisation fosters deeper customer engagement by offering experiences that feel truly personalised without compromising privacy. This is potentially transformative for loyalty programmes and e-commerce customer journeys.
Implementing Private Personalisation
Adopting Private Personalisation requires a strategic shift in how businesses approach customer data. Here are some steps to get started:
1. Prioritise Privacy
Make data privacy, transparency and customer empowerment a central pillar of your marketing strategy. Ensure that customers understand the measures you’ve taken to protect their data and help then get value from it. Simple.
2. Empower Customers
Be comfortable giving customers more control over their data, and with providing transparency around its use. Enhance their overall experience with Private Personalisation. Upgrade from Omni-Channel Marketing to Omni-Personal Marketing; wrapping the customer experience around the customer rather than around internal company processes and departments.
3. Promote Participation
With Customers having access to their own data, they can do things with it. How about going beyond annual ‘experience wrapped’ insights in a customer app, to providing customers with real-time insights about their shopping behaviours? As in-app intelligence becomes more sophisticated, participation can lead to co-creation of suggestions, recommendations and experiences for themselves, and for other customers like them.
4. Choose The Right Technology
In-App Data Stores/Wallets allow customers to store and manage their information. Encryption and robust security measures are essential. Moving Intelligence into customer apps now prepares the path for Large Language Model (LLM) powered Customer Agents such as Personal Shoppers. Getting the right architecture in place from the start with is essential, and will power the roadmap to AI.
5. Get Started
Edge and AI technology are moving quickly. Companies that start to experiment early will be in pole position when on-device Customer AI Agents become feasible at scale.
Private Personalisation: A Win-Win
In a turbulent and rapidly evolving market environment, Private Personalisation emerges as a win-win solution. It allows businesses to offer hyper-personalised experiences while guaranteeing customer privacy and aligning with future data protection laws. By empowering customers with control over their data and leveraging in-app personal intelligence, businesses can build trust, foster engagement, and thrive in an era where privacy and personalisation coexist harmoniously. It’s not just a new way of doing marketing; it’s a paradigm shift to a more ethical and human centric world that uplifts outcomes for all.
DataSapien provides a suite of Private Personalisation capabilities for customer applications – packaged as a productised and embeddable software bundle (SDK), combined with an enterprise server-side data orchestration environment for easy and comprehensive integration with Customer Data Environments (CDP, CRM, LLM, etc).
