There have been many recent definitions of Zero Party data, centering on the consumers sharing data with a brand as a very deliberate act. There is a gray area in between first party data held in a CRM that is openly declared and actual zero party data volunteered for a specific purpose. This well thought through piece by Sergio Maldanado of PrivacyCloud takes this apart and examines MarTech’s interpretation of the Zero Party ideology.
The prevailing forces upon marketing technology set the scene for “a value proposition built around the declared preferences of our potential customers, limiting data collection efforts to those strictly necessary for the task at hand, has good chances of not even requiring the interruption associated with consent management. And it also makes it easy to find alignment with the current social demand for transparency and control.“
“Zero-Party data is born out of consensus between people and organizations, without risk of commoditization or trade — and thus stored in shared or escrowed repositories [..] the new shared repositories do not require tricks or interruptions to ensure legal compliance. [..] The audience or customer base decide at all times which data they choose to expose“
Simply Googling “Zero Party Data” will return a plethora of results suggesting out surveys and other trawls for customer data and very little regard to giving true agency to consumers over their data. This is the point of the post.
“Zero-Party data will quickly turn into mere “retrieved” information (First-Party) if we follow the natural instinct of brand-centric approaches. That is, sending out a few surveys for the enrichment of profiles on a CRM. This would then be followed by segmentation and messaging, or targeting.”
The post offers a more authentic approach:
- “Each organization decides on the levers determining its value proposition, or defines a hypothesis on the manner in which such levers will be moved by the customer’s needs, preferences, or data.
- Such possibilities are exposed to the audience, representing an “API” (Application Programming Interface) of sorts to the company’s offering.
- Individuals pick the levers they find most suitable, naturally providing whichever values or data points resolve the variables on display.“
Read the whole post with all the charts here: On Zero-Party Data and the dangers of consent-based Marketing by Sergio Maldonado on Medium