Data privacy and managing consents for collecting, processing and activating consumer data is a required license-to-operate to execute your CX data strategy. But why is customer centric consent and preference management practices seldomly applied as a hashtag#MarTech principle despite its crucial and legal role? 

What is customer centric consent and preference management practice?

It starts with the principle that the customer has ownership of the data your business collects, processes and activates in your MarTech stack. As a result, the customer must have the ultimate control over their consent and data: Control to consent to first party data collection, usage, and sharing, control of the zero party data they intentionally and proactively shares with your brand, control to influence preferred communication channels, content, frequency, profiling, personalization etc.
A customer-centric consent and preference practice puts the customer in the driver's seat, builds trust through data transparency, and drives relevant marketing communications and customer experiences. So why do most business only adhere to minimum consent requirements and follow an inside-out, marketer-centric consent and preference practice?

Who wants to pick up the bill? 

Historically we have managed MarTech stacks in channel-specific data siloes. Data ownership has been decentralized and spread across performance marketing, commerce, loyalty & sales teams. With the introduction of CDPs we have started breaking down the data silos. The unified customer profile of the CDP enables an enterprise-wide data asset, and CX teams can start executing true omnichannel customer journeys. Oftentimes, however, data privacy and consent management is mostly considered a tedious prerequisite you want to get done with as painless as possible.
Rethinking your customer experiences from a customer-centric data privacy and preference point-of-view can be a tough project to sell into the MarTech stakeholder landscape. It slows down the time to deliver, it requires strategic business alignment, and it introduces additional technical complexity when coupled with a modern channel-agnostic consent and preference management platform.

Here are 3 steps to make customer-centric consent and preference management attractive for your MarTech stakeholders:

1) Scope the initial onboarding of the consent and preference management platform with a marketeer-centric practice. This will ensure the technical capabilities to eventually support a future customer-centric practice without slowing down the time to deliver on data activation.

2) Test a customer-centric prototype practice against the current-marketeer centric consent practice, proving that giving control to the customer does not impact your CX KPIs negatively.

3) Turn data privacy into a brand asset, moving the focus of data privacy from a legal prerequisite into a trust building, customer relevance and, ultimately, brand value creating asset.