Marketing is undergoing an evolution right before our very eyes. Marketers take note: a Copernican Event is nearing. Soon, everyone will recognize that people are the center of the shopper universe. As a consequence, marketers must kneel to the concerns and needs of the people and of the individual, while still focusing on their marketing goals and maintaining the health of their organization.
Privacy and security will be people's #1 concern and need respectively by the end of this year. In order to protect themselves, people will strengthen their privacy-penumbra, the invisible barrier between self and the world that protects them from unwanted interaction. To effectively traverse the privacy-penumbra and engage people, marketers will need to develop and learn new ways of managing and leveraging personal data -- especially from individuals directly.
Marketing's Copernican Event has been approaching for thousands of years and is finally upon us. Lets look at the history that led us to where we're at today.
News flash, Greece, 3rd century BC: Aristarchus of Samos proposes that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
News flash, Poland, 1543: Nicolaus Copernicus introduces mathematical models that prove and support Samos' hypothesis: the earth is not the center of the universe, it revolves around the sun. This insight establishes the Copernican Principal, the understanding that humans do not hold a centrally favored position in the universe.
News flash, London, 2015: The Economist Business Unit (EBI) and Marketo report that marketers see their role transforming and that this transformation will influence the gravitational forces within business and marketing. Data-driven digital marketing in particular, will become the central force of business and people engagement within the shopper universe. Marketo predicts that marketing will be the primary driver of revenue, personalized customer experience and engagement, organizational transformation and structure in the future. Digging deeper, the EBI study reports that marketers believe the Internet of Things (51%), real-time personalization transactions (50%), wearable technology (29%), virtual/augmented retail (26%) and in a far distant fifth place, privacy backlash (13%), will have the biggest impact on the practice of marketing by 2020.
News flash, Sunnyvale, 2015: mCordis anticipates an impending Copernican Event, an event characterized by the release of mathematical proofs that establish people as the central force influencing the celestial bodies in the shopper universe, not marketing. Once the event is triggered, everyone will recognize that people (they're people, not consumers, shoppers, voters or constituents, but people) as the driving force of revenue, determinators of relevance and the influencers of change. Moreover, while the Internet of Things, real-time personalization transactions, wearable technology, virtual/augmented retail will certainly have an impact on marketing and business as a whole, mCordis predicts that the privacy backlash will be the number one force marketers must contend with by 2020.
Today, according to the EBI study only 13% of marketers are concerned about privacy. mCordis believes their focus is in the wrong place. Managing privacy will take first place, not fifth place in the rankings. Those that handle this management properly will be using privacy as the basis of competitive advantage, rather than as a PR tool to respond to the "backlash."
In the future if marketers want to truly be relevant and optimize a relationship with people, they must first learn to embrace privacy as the driving force of people-engagement. They must learn to cross the individual's privacy-penumbra. Today this barrier is weak, but as peoples awareness of data exchange practices increase, data breaches proliferate and with the release and adoption of new tools, like personal data stores, an individual's privacy-penumbra will strengthen. A strong barrier will give the individual the power to protect what matters most to them, their sovereignty as an individual and the ability to optimize their commercial interactions within the shopper universe.
mCordis challenges every marketer to re-orientate their views and put people and privacy at the center of the marketing universe and consider how this prospective may change how they manage their marketing strategies and activities as they navigate marketing's evolution.
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