The Problem

"...A growing number of Marketing Cloud (MC) customers want to offer a similar amount of transparency and trust to their customers (aka end consumers)...we need you to design a complete solution that targets some part of it."

Craig Birchler, Vice President of User Experience at Marketing Cloud, Salesforce

Research

Through interviewing with Craig, we learned that marketers have observed growing consumer concerns and demands for data transparency. To find out how to address this dual-client challenge, we interviewed and survey 20+ end-consumers and marketers.

End-consumer:

We interviewed 25 general consumers, aged 19 to 65, using webpage mockups to explore their perceptions of brands and data collection practices. This revealed that data transparency is contextual to the relevance of the services and products offered by a brand. For instance, consumers trust Starbucks more when asked about dietary restrictions compared to Target, as Target’s diverse product offerings dilute the perceived relevance of collecting such data.

Our interviews also revealed that consumers:

• Engage most frequently with emails in marketing outreach.

• Are concerned about what data is collected and how it is used, but this information is typically not disclosed unless explicitly requested.

These findings helped us develop the concept that transparency relies on three key factors: aligned mental models, visibility, and feedback.

This is perfect. Because the marketers were willing to provide more information on what and how, identified in our marketer surveys.

Marketers:

Marketers need data to ensure a brand's success and deliver a rewarding customer experience. However, not collecting data or deleting collected data is not the solution to building transparency. Instead, marketers must:

• Provide clear information on what end-consumer data is collected and how it is used

• Prepare materials at various levels of detail to accommodate end-consumers who wish to learn more

• Implement a system to efficiently generate and share information that explains all collected data to enhance consumer understanding

How Might We…

How might we help marketers enhance end-consumers' understanding of collected data to promote transparency, thereby building greater brand affinity and trust?

Solution

While examining precedents from Apple, a brand highly praised for its privacy protection, we identified an opportunity in using icons on its App Store privacy policies page to assist understanding of consumer rights and the brand's data restrictions. In our secondary research, we found that the ingredient table from Native, a personal hygiene brand, and the privacy information table from ASOS, a UK fashion brand, provided significantly more clarity compared to traditional formats. These approaches resulted in a strong sense of transparency and trust during our interviews.

Based on these findings, we developed a 2-part result that incorporates icons and table templates to address the three key factors of transparency:

Integration in the Marketing Cloud Platform

Watch the demo below to learn more about how our solution integrates seamlessly with the Marketing Cloud platform. *This concise video might requires basic knowledge of the Marketing Cloud platform to understand.