Category Archives: Sales governance

On My Honor as a Salesperson. A New Look at Why Sales Ethics Matter

Thursday, 28 May 2020 16:51
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Which risk poses the greatest threat to a company’s market value – Pandemics and natural disasters? Terrorism? Product defects? Patent infringement? Theft of intellectual property? Lack of moral boundaries?

If you answered anything but the last choice, think again. The decimation of market value at Tyco, Worldcom, and Enron – three of the most prominent ethical meltdowns of our time – illustrates what can occur when a company lacks ethical footing. According to Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, the cumulative decline in market capitalization resulting from fraud at these three companies was $136 billion.

The financial impact of Covid-19 on the global stock market may never be fully known. But one thing stands out: unlike most risks, companies have ultimate control over their moral conduct.

Many corporate scandals are hatched in the executive suite and metastasize into the organization. The sales operation is a fecund spot for seeding schemes because it is directly connected with the most watched measurement a company maintains and shares: revenue.

Sales is also the linchpin for the trust between a company and its customers. For example, the Wells Fargo consumer credit card scandal was the consequence of stock-price bonus incentives granted to then-CEO John Stumpf and a cadre of senior executives. To enrich themselves, they usurped customer trust and exploited employees by encumbering them with onerous performance quotas, and followed through by browbeating them into hitting targets that would be attractive to investment analysts. The rationale was that when thresholds were met, analysts would make buy recommendations for Wells Fargo stock, elevating its price. The scheme worked for a while before the business media uncovered the story. In the end, Stumpf was fired over the scandal and his bonuses clawed back or terminated.

Bad ethics can take root elsewhere in the hierarchy. When governance and audit controls are ineffective, they can easily spread, infecting employees, suppliers, channel partners, and customers. In 1998, ethical violations at Prudential Insurance Company’s sales organization became so pervasive that the company’s management eventually estimated its liability from the pending class-action lawsuit at $2 billion. Among the voluminous courtroom testimony from the case was this statement from a Prudential sales rep: “Your judgment gets clouded out in the field when you are pressured to sell, sell, sell.” More than two decades later, sales reps face the same difficulty.

How can harm from unethical behavior be prevented? First, accept that no company is immune from facing ethical dilemmas, and second, understand that there are no guarantees that ethical decisions will somehow prevail. This is especially true for companies proclaiming themselves “customer-focused” or “customer-centric.”

Companies must purposefully and actively reduce the opportunities for unethical behavior to enter an organization. Taking key steps such as developing and communicating a corporate code of conduct, modeling ethical behavior in the C-Suite, implementing strong governance and accountability, and making it safe for employees to speak up without fear of retaliation are vital. Importantly, companies must take prompt and decisive action when incidents are reported.

Still, when it comes to acknowledging the possibility of malfeasance in their organization, many senior executives are dismissive. I often hear, “that type of thing could never happen here,” quickly followed by “we don’t hire those kinds of people,” as if “those kinds of people” are easy to spot in the interview. In fact, in companies large and small in any industry, the potential for making unethical choices always exists. If the risks aren’t acknowledged, understood, and managed, stakeholder harm becomes not only probable, but certain.

One “sales-driven” company I worked for felt immune to ethical risks, and their hubris cost them more than $1 million from a scam that began with one rogue sales employee, “Travis Doe.” Travis was a reseller account manager. He was tall, charismatic, confident. He was good at golf. At sales meetings, Travis could always be found in the center of a group of colleagues, sharing a bawdy new joke, or regaling them with something useful he learned over his long career in computer sales.

Travis’s compensation plan earned him a comfortable six-figure income. But he figured out a way to augment that. Travis began his scheme with a transaction my employer made routine: he established a new reseller account. In this case, Travis gave this one a bogus name, bogus address, and bogus line-of-business. Bogus everything. He even anointed himself CEO – a move that came back to haunt him.

The cleverness of Travis’s scheme came from the fact that resellers received 40% discounts for all IT hardware. When customers and prospects sent requests for quotes or placed orders, Travis circumvented them to his bogus company. In this way, Travis pocketed a healthy margin on every order his bogus company processed. There’s more. In addition to that revenue stream, my employer also paid Travis commission on his “reseller’s” sales because, of course, the bogus company was in Travis’s portfolio.

It took an alert order administrator who spotted a part number anomaly to unravel Travis’s scheme. When she called the “reseller” to explain the problem, she was told, “Our president, Travis Doe, will call you back.” The order administrator reported Travis, and he was quietly fired about a week later.

Travis’s scheme created only losers. A characteristic common to all ethical breakdowns. If Travis’s immediate boss knew about his dishonesty, why didn’t he stop him? If he didn’t know, what excuse could he offer for being ignorant about a scam happening in his own office? You know it’s a bad day when any answer you provide isn’t a good one.

In their desire to move on, many executives at the company looked no further than blaming Travis. “You’re always going to have a ‘bad apple,’ or two,” senior managers somberly told me. A convenient rationalization, but very misleading. Other people, from the CEO down, were culpable. Sales Administration allowed account managers to establish reseller accounts without any oversight. Internal audit didn’t see a glaring opportunity for fraud in the order entry process. Contracts administration had no vetting rigor beyond “can you fog a mirror?” Flush with sales orders, the company blithely looked askance despite ongoing grumbling from staff that large dollar orders were routinely being processed through a “reseller” whose qualifications were murky, at best.

This incident happened before social media platforms became ubiquitous. The total direct cost from Travis’s scheme totaled more than $1 million. But that’s without adding the incalculable cost of broken morale and corroded trust. The company issued no press releases or public explanations. No trade journal carried the story. The cost of this scam got paved flatter than a pancake into company’s Income Statement.

Any discussion of ethics involves drawing boundaries. But drawing boundaries for sales ethics is much easier said than done:

“I’ll sell an early version of my software that isn’t fully tested, but I won’t sell anything that I know doesn’t work.”

“I won’t bring up the fact that I’m missing a key feature, but I won’t lie about its absence.”

“At the end of the quarter, I will commit resources I don’t control so I can win the sale, but I won’t promise my prospective customer anything I know cannot be delivered.”

“I won’t overcharge anyone, but I won’t sell at the lowest possible price, either.”

“I’ll look out for my client’s best interests but only if doing so doesn’t jeopardize my business.”

As author David Quammen writes in Wild Thoughts From Wild Places, “Not every crisp line represents a triumph of ethical clarity.” An individual’s ethical interpretations are rarely constant. Rather, they’re a combination of of a person’s current emotions, situation, values, experience, logic and personality. What makes a practice ethical or not can be difficult to define.

This is why evaluating what’s ethical, what’s the right thing to do, or how to get the right thing done requires having conversations about dilemmas. Unfortunately, that idea is heretic in many sales cultures today, where perceiving things as black or white is often considered a badge of honor. “Never lie!” and “A half-truth is the same as a lie,” were among the opinions readers posted when I asked about resolving ethical dilemmas on LinkedIn sales forum. The problem is, judging actions as “right” and “wrong” discourages conversations about ethics in the first place. Most situations business development professionals encounter are not that clear.

Mitigating ethical risk is a vexing challenge for organizations – particularly those with global operations – because ethical standards must first be defined, documented, communicated and followed. In addition, companies must remember that their employees don’t enter the workplace a tabula rasa. Corporate expectations for ethical conduct will always be interpreted through an individual’s awareness of his or her own values.  Even then, we can only be protected when people have the motivation and resolve to act accordingly.

Companies should embrace ethical dilemmas by fostering a culture for open, candid discussion about them. That means  encouraging salespeople and marketing personnel to identify issues, confront them, and take action before they spiral out of control.

Malfeasance thrives in the eye of the perfect storm 1) high financial incentives for fraud, 2) lax audit controls and governance, and 3) non-integrated processes. We need a tocsin to sound in the boardroom and executive suite. Ethical lapses can destroy the best business plans, corporate and personal reputations, and brand integrity. There are too many opportunistic Travises in the world, and too much value at risk, to ignore the warning signs

A Future Without Secrets? Why We Need Ethical Data Governance

Wednesday, 25 October 2017 17:46
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Do You Want to Know a Secret? 

When the Beatles released this song in 1963, the world was different. Less frantic, and in many ways, blissfully naïve.

Listen/ Do you want to know a secret/Do you promise not to tell?, whoa oh, oh

Let me whisper in your ear/ Say the words you long to hear/ I’m in love with you!

Fifty years of social progress has obviated the need for partners to wax poetic. In 2014, Good2Go, an iPhone application, was launched to help people bypass romance and jump to a lascivious endgame. Shortly afterward, Apple kicked Good2Go off its platform, citing application guidelines that prohibit objectionable or crude content. There were few protests, because it turns out, Good2Go wasn’t a hit with customers, either. Among the comments: “Even scarier than talking about sex,” and “worse than nothing.”

No secrets, and no promises not to tell. When it was originally released, Good2Go required users to provide the name of their partner du jour, time consent was given, and each person’s state of sobriety. The ostensible purpose for creating Good2Go was to help people document encounters before things got steamy, should there be allegations of impropriety later on.

But once the data was captured, what did the company intend to do with it? I don’t know, exactly. One thing’s for certain: it wasn’t just going to sit there, un-analyzed, or un-shared.

By pressing Submit, key data about the hookup breezed into the cloud. No strings attached, just like the liaison. Good2Go offered a curt privacy disclaimer: “We may not be able to control how your personal information is treated, transferred, or used.” Paul McCartney, step aside! There’s nothing like legal fine print to stoke the fires of passion.

If you’re a control freak about your personal information, some free advice: chuck your computer and iPhone immediately, and get off the grid. Wait about 20 years. After that, there will be no secrets. Personal privacy will be quaint anachronism, and everyone will be part of a scandal. One upside: nobody will care.

Whenever we give up personal details – whether online, over the phone, or on paper – the best we can hope for is that the custodians of our data will behave ethically, and take adequate measures to conceal our information from those who might abuse it. Recently, the Equifax data hack made it clear those are dangerous assumptions. The company’s massive databases contained millions of individual social security numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and credit scores, but Equifax executives didn’t give a tinker’s damn whether consumers were protected.

The company squandered opportunities to prevent outsiders from hacking into this sensitive information, allowing 143 million private records to fall into nefarious hands. “The Equifax hacks are a case study in why we need better data breach laws . . . Equifax handled a disastrous hack poorly. But the core of their behavior isn’t unusual,” read a headline on Vox, an online media website.

Breaches happen more than most people know. Your right to be informed depends on where you live. “The clamor for a standardized data breach notification requirement has become almost as quotidian as a data breach itself. Companies no longer wonder whether they will ever have to notify consumers of a breach but rather when they will do so. Incident response planning, however, is currently complicated by the existence of 47 different state breach notification laws and those of additional jurisdictions such as D.C., New York City, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands. The variety is no doubt confusing and increases the compliance costs for companies,” according to another article, Examining the President’s Proposed National Data Breach Notification Standard Against Existing Legislation.

That article was written in 2015, when Obama was president, and before the government stopped caring about protecting consumers. With Trump in office, don’t hold your breath waiting for this initiative. In the meantime, if you want to navigate the thicket of data breach notification laws state-by-state, click here. Please remind me who has information power: Consumers – or the companies that use their data? I keep forgetting.

Sometimes, a company has good reasons to delay disclosure about a data breach. For example, a forensic investigation might require secrecy. Or, a company might need to learn the full extent of a breach before sharing information with customers. But proving malfeasance can be difficult. Equifax hasn’t disclosed exactly why it waited weeks to inform customers about the breach, but during that time, its senior executives sold millions of dollars of Equifax stock. A company spokesperson told The Washington Post that at the time, the company’s executives had no knowledge of the breach.

“No knowledge” . . . of 143 million stolen records . . . That sounds far-fetched to me, too. The hacking and the timing of the stock sale brought Equifax CEO Richard F. Smith in front of Elizabeth Warren for a Senate hearing. He had some ‘splaining to do, and he didn’t project well in front of the cameras. In characteristic fashion, Senator Warren emasculated him the same way she did Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. In a company press release from September 7, after the breach was publicly disclosed, Smith said, “We pride ourselves on being a leader in managing and protecting data, and we are conducting a thorough review of our overall security operations.” I believe the second part of that sentence, but I’m calling BS on the first.

Personal privacy faces unprecedented threats. In the digital era, almost everything we do leaves a trail of recorded transactions and events that is harvested and maintained. After it’s released into the cloud, it’s hard to know who – or what – controls it. As a result, we have far less control over our data privacy than we did 30 years ago, when smaller amounts of our data were housed in cumbersome silos. But the silos came down, along with the cost of storing data. Most significantly, companies have developed sophisticated tools and algorithms to systematically exploit it. As a result, corporations and government agencies have steadily gained hegemony over our data and our privacy. Today, they control five powerful variables that profoundly affect our privacy: capture, use, retention, protection, and ownership of consumer data.

Capture: Though we might not be aware, we routinely give up a mother lode of personal details every second through our mobile phones, wearable sensors, and the IoT (Internet of Things). Even more digital exhaust gets captured and recorded through devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which are at their core, eavesdropping devices. But for now, I’ve stopped fussing because doing so compares to peeing into the wind. Nobody wants to give up the latest digital gadgetry, and or to suffer the indignities of not having “personalized experiences.” I concede that the data capture pig has permanently left his pen. He has grown too strong to restrain, too fat to ever fit back through the gate.

From here, I’ll focus on manageable issues:

Use: Companies can – and should – be held accountable for how they use personal information. “Compliance with federal and state laws” does not absolve them from providing responsible governance and strong consumer protection.

Retention: How long should companies keep personal data? Do customers have a right to be forgotten, as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in Europe (pending May, 2018) will enable? What should companies disclose to consumers? And is it ethical for companies to charge customers for deleting personal information? These not-hypothetical questions were at the center of the Ashley Madison hacking case, in which the company assessed its customers a fee for expunging their personal data. Rather than deleting the data as promised, Ashley Madison simply changed the record status to “inactive,” and moved the files to a backend server. Those records were stolen in the hack, along with the active ones.

Protection: As data has increased in value, it has become a more attractive target for theft. The threats are significant and omnipresent. But regulation and corporate risk mitigation measures such as cyber-security haven’t kept pace. The nine largest consumer data hacks leading up to Equifax in 2017 illustrate the outcomes when companies are lackadaisical about data security. The direct costs are substantial, the indirect costs incalculable.

Ownership: The question of data ownership is central to preserving consumer privacy. But sometimes, provenance and ownership are difficult to track. Further, Terms of Service statements aren’t explicit, and once consumers have created data, they rarely control it. And since data can be copied, sold, and repackaged, and re-sold, custodianship and responsibilities for protecting consumer data becomes a murky issue. Yet, privacy preservation in the digital age demands clarity over this basic matter.

The road ahead. “The increased amount of and use of data calls into questions pressing issues of fairness, responsibility and accountability, and whether existing legislation is fit to safeguard against harm to an individual or group’s privacy, welfare or physical safety,” according to the Open Data Institute’s September 13, 2017 report, Ethical Data Handling. Public safety should not be taken for granted, and the benevolence of government never assumed. As I wrote in an article, The Dark Side of Online Lead Generation, companies routinely use data to exploit the most vulnerable consumers – who can also be the most profitable. 

Access to consumer information confers an obligation on an organization to

1. be transparent about ownership,

2. control how the data is used,

3. ensure the data is protected from unintended use, and

4. ensure that consumers will not be harmed.

This is a monumental order. Why would any company voluntarily sign up? Because it’s the ethical, customer-centric thing to do. But there are self-serving advantages, too: First, without adopting constraints, businesses will undermine their revenue generation efforts. Ethical data governance enables trust. Second, companies that demonstrate strong data governance will achieve competitive advantages over ones that are sloppy and uncaring.

To create good privacy outcomes for customers, executives must answer five data-governance questions:

  1. Does our use of the data reflect consumer preferences?
  2. Is our intended use for this data ethical?
  3. Is our intended use fair and respectful to our customers and prospects?
  4. Have our customers been provided any control over how their data is collected, stored, and used?
  5. Is our organization appropriately transparent about our intentions, policies, and safeguards?

The as-is state, circa October, 2017. A passage extracted from a privacy statement that just landed on my desk serves as a shiny emblem for how far we need to go with data governance:

“To protect your personal information from unauthorized access and use, we use security measures that comply with federal and state laws. These measures include computer safeguards and secured files and buildings. We limit access to your information to those who need it to do their job.”

These strictures, if you want to call them that, offer no solace to the wary.

When a company captures or requests information from customers, they should reveal,

  1. what data is being collected
  2. the entity or company that owns the data
  3. who has access to that data
  4. specifics regarding how the data will be used
  5. existing internal measures that protect confidentiality
  6. whether the data will be shared with third parties, which ones, and for what purpose(s)
  7. the length of time that data will be retained
  8. customer rights for data erasure and/or amendment
  9. where to go within the organization for redress of consumer issues regarding data
  10. the federal, state, and local laws that govern the company’s use of that data

“Business data is everything. Protect it well,” reads a full-page ad for Carbonite, a data security company. In previous articles, I have complained about companies trivializing C-Level roles (do companies really need Chief Listening Officers?). But the tocsin that just sounded from the Equifax hack tells us that it’s past time to give Data Governance a chair in the C-Suite. (Note: the GDPR laws mandate certain companies assign a Data Protection Officer or DPO.) Should a new position be created, CDGO, Chief Data Governance Officer? I’ll make the case in a future article.

A regulated market? “A regulated national information market could allow personal information to be bought and sold, conferring on the seller the right to determine how much information is divulged,” Kenneth Laudon of New York University wrote in a 1996 article titled Markets and Privacy. He was ahead of his time. “More recently, the World Economic Forum proposed the concept of a data bank account. A person’s data, it suggested should ‘reside in an account where it would be controlled, managed, exchanged and accounted for.’ The idea seems elegant, but neither a market nor data accounts have materialized yet,” according to The Economist (Fuel of the Future, May 6, 2017).

Ethical data governance: the way forward. A white paper, Guiding Principles for the Ethical Use of Data   by Jennifer Glasgow and Sheila Colclasure, offers a clear case for corporate data governance: “As in any relationship, business or otherwise, trust needs to be earned, sustained and nurtured over time. To succeed in the long run brands, have to first be accountable. Therefore, a common understanding of what it means to act ethically with consumer data is required. Without a common set of rules or proper governance, it’s unrealistic to assume brands across a vast marketplace can meet this expectation and maintain the trust of the consumers they serve over time.”

Sounds like common sense. Why then, do so many companies choose a riskier, ethically-shaky path? Greed? Naivete? Stupidity? Lack of will? It’s hard to say, exactly.

Listen/ Do you want to know a secret/ Do you promise not to tell?

Ethical data governance will help companies fulfill this critically important consumer expectation.

Author’s note: To read the previous articles in this series about data privacy and risk, please click the links below:

In the Digital Revolution, Customers Have Nothing to Lose But Their Privacy 

Companies That Abuse Consumer Privacy Might Feel Their Fury – Again

Hate, Bad Product Placement, and Brand Risk

Thursday, 28 September 2017 18:24
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The author and his dogs on The Lawn at the University of Virginia. The Rotunda appears in the background.

 

What keeps marketing executives up at night? A duo of sticky problems:

  1. how to create unique product designs that consumers easily recognize, and
  2. how to ensure consumers prefer their product, and not ones that appear similar.

By solving these two challenges, marketers earn a beautiful gem: brand equity. Enjoy it. Cherish it. But remember – in an instant, that gem can turn ugly.

On August 11, 2017, white supremacists organized a rally called Unite the Right, and marched in Charlottesville. The group of about 100 men and women walked past the University of Virginia’s iconic Rotunda, and then down a pacific area on the UVa grounds known affectionately as The Lawn.

Chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans, the supremacists carried torches that were readily identifiable based on their distinctive features: Tiki-brand torches, manufactured by a Wisconsin-based company called Lamplight. The racist symbolism of the torches and their connection to the Ku Klux Klan was not a coincidence. The purpose was to communicate an odious message, and to intimidate anyone watching.

It’s unlikely that product planners at Lamplight ever developed a use case for this malevolent activity. How could they? An abiding assumption for most marketers – myself included – is that our prospective customers have benign intent for using our products or services. When deciding how many torches to manufacture and where to distribute them, Lamplight probably considers banal matters like economic conditions, leisure trends, and weather patterns – not the number of hate rallies to be held, or how many marchers will participate.

For Lamplight, the prominent role their torches played in the Charlottesville tragedy are what author Nassim Taleb calls Black Swan events – situations that are extremely difficult to predict. The proverbial blind-side tackle. The catastrophe that came out of nowhere. No company should ever be self-satisfied that such things could never happen. Prior to August 11th, few people heard of Lamplight, or its parent company, W. C. Bradley. After that, both became known globally, for all the wrong reasons.

Shortly after the Unite the Right rally video went viral, the company issued the following statement:

“TIKI Brand is not associated in any way with the events that took place in Charlottesville and are deeply saddened and disappointed. We do not support their message or the use of our products in this way. Our products are designed to enhance backyard gatherings and to help family and friends connect with each other at home in their yard.”

Marketers and salespeople worship at the revenue altar, and here’s a company that states unequivocally that some revenue is filthy, and they’d rather not have it to augment the “top line.” Kudos to them not only for their morals, but for making them public.

Tiki torches weren’t the only easy-to-identify brand dragged into the supremacist vortex:

New Balance shoes was recognized by a writer for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer as “the official shoe of white people.”

The Detroit Redwings hockey team had their logo corrupted by the Unite the Right marchers, who modified it only slightly. On August 12, @onelectionday posted a Tweet that would make any marketer break out in a cold sweat:

“Wait a minute…@DetroitRedWings have you sanctioned the use of your logo here or is a copyright infringement suit pending?”

Perry Polo shirts. “The alt-right’s Proud Boys love Fred Perry polo shirts. The feeling is not mutual,” wrote Kyle Swenson in The Washington Post on July 10. Proud Boys describes itself as a “western-chauvinist men’s club” and the distinct Fred Perry [shirt] design helps them “sport a common uniform: black polo shirts trimmed in yellow stripes.”

In the aftermath, all three companies moved quickly with public statements:

“New Balance does not tolerate bigotry or hatred in any form…New Balance is a values-driven organization and culture that believes in humanity, integrity, community and mutual respect for people around the world.”

“The Red Wings believe that hockey is for Everyone and we celebrate the diversity of our fan base and our nation . . . We are exploring every possible legal action as it pertains to the misuse of our logo in this disturbing demonstration.”

“No, [Perry Polo shirts doesn’t] support the ideals or the group that you speak of . . . It is counter to our beliefs and the people we work with.”

Bad product placement is not a trivial issue. Ubiquitous video cameras and social media have upped the risks for companies. It’s hard to say how long it will take these brands to lose their linkages to heinous events, as others have suffered:

  • White Ford Bronco and OJ Simpson
  • Tic Tacs and the Donald Trump – Access Hollywood video
  • Skittles and Donald Trump Jr.’s statement about Syrian refugees
  • Skittles and the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012

On June 17, 1994, over 95 million people watched livestream coverage of the OJ Simpson chase, but nobody at Ford cheered about the free product placement. Ford stopped selling the Bronco in 1996, though it plans to reintroduce the model in 2020. No doubt, one of the top-of-mind questions at Ford is how many years it will take for the OJ-Bronco connection to dissolve. 2020 probably seemed safe for re-introduction, because in 1996, the core buying demographic for the 2020 either wasn’t yet born, or couldn’t comprehend the news reports. Still, I wonder if white will be among the color choices.

What’s the impact on brands and revenue when products are tied to hate and political controversies? Not good – at least, initially. “When a brand gets involved in political issues, whether accidentally or on purpose, it’s bound to have an impact on how consumers talk about it on social media,” according to a December 12, 2016 AdWeek article, How New Balance, Pepsi and Kellogg’s Were Impacted by Trump Controversies. “Three brands that made headlines due to the election of Donald Trump—New Balance, Pepsi and Kellogg’s—had to deal with negative sentiment on social media as a result.” A research company, Taykey, explored how each incident impacted the brands on social media.

New Balance. In November 2016, consumers protested New Balance when the company’s VP of Public Affairs, Matt LeBretton, spoke about President-elect Trump’s position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, telling The Wall Street Journal that “things are going to move in the right direction.” Some New Balance customers took umbrage to that endorsement, and protested by posting videos of burning New Balance Shoes. As a result, “brand sentiment declined by 75%,” according to Taykay. “Social conversation volume for New Balance rose by 100% (their biggest conversation-generating event of the year). This conversation was negative, though, and brand sentiment declined by 75 percent.”

Pepsi. Following the US presidential election in 2016, Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi said some of her employees were “in mourning” about Trump’s election. Trump loyalists were not pleased with that comment. They announced a boycott of Pepsi products, and launched fake news stories alleging that Nooyi told Trump supporters to “take their business elsewhere.”

“Again, social media conversation volume for Pepsi spiked, but the negative conversation drove social brand sentiment down by 93%, as positive sentiment for Pepsi dropped from 72% to 4.5%, according to Taykey . . . However, since the incident, positive sentiment for the brand has been on the rise.”

Kellogg’s. Compared with Pepsi, Kellogg’s has faced more durable backlash after terminating its advertising on Breitbart, a website popular with white supremacists. Following that action, Breitbart launched a #DumpKelloggs campaign, and encouraged Trump supporters to boycott Kellogg’s products. “The boycott caused Kellogg’s social media sentiment to fall dramatically, with a 75 percent nosedive, according to Taykey. Through Dec. 5, that sentiment had stayed mostly negative.”

Brand managers cannot easily mitigate the risks that their products could become entangled in public controversies. But they can be prepared for what to do when it happens:

  1. Immediately issue a public statement to separates the company, its products, and its brand from the controversy.
  2. Make the statement clear and unequivocal. Do not leave room for other interpretations.
  3. Stick to the brand knitting. Don’t attempt to exploit the controversy to drive sales, or to create related advertising messages. These only serve to solidify negative connections in consumers’ minds.

Tiki torches, New Balance shoes, and Perry Polo shirts were not the only brands to get sullied on August 11th. The University of Virginia did, too. The school’s logo features a simple white outline of its Rotunda surrounded by orange. With its viewpoint from The Lawn, the logo is integral to the UVa brand, and instantly recognizable to UVa alumni. For me, the logo carries meaning beyond the physical building that Thomas Jefferson designed, and is now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. That enslaved people constructed the building brick-by-brick and board-by-board makes the August events in Charlottesville even more poignant today.

For the time being, I can’t un-see the white supremacist marchers, or stop hearing their hateful chants as they walked past the Rotunda. And I can’t ignore their worldview that we should return to the institutions and society that subjugated human beings, and openly advocated the existence of a “superior race.”

At least in Virginia, many of us have convinced ourselves that Jefferson – who himself enslaved over 220 people – would be reviled at the Unite the Right marchers, and what they stand for. “It is safer to have the whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance,” Jefferson said. For generations, that idea has been woven into UVa’s brand. On August 11th 2017, I suspect Jefferson was twirling in his grave.

Do Salespeople Lie More Than Other Professionals?

Tuesday, 29 August 2017 17:03
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Compared to other professions, are salespeople disproportionately prone to lying? To reveal the answer, I searched online for most dishonest professions, and was rewarded with several surveys. One study conducted in 2014 listed the top 10 least honest (the number following indicates the percentage of survey respondents who believed the profession trustworthy):

Lobbyists – 6%
Members of Congress – 8%
Car salespeople – 9%
State office holders – 14%
Advertising practitioners – 14%
TV reporters – 20%
Lawyers – 20%
Newspaper reporters – 21%
Business executives – 22%
Local office holders – 23%

Go us! Of the top 10 most dishonest professions, biz-developers hold only three slots – lobbyists, car salespeople, and advertising practitioners. Still, as marketing/sales professionals, we’re over-the-top touchy about our honesty image.

Earlier this month, a writer on LinkedIn asked whether it’s acceptable for salespeople to lie. He felt that lying seems the new normal in selling, and he invited others to weigh in. Some opinions were as malleable as a steel girder:

  • “My answer is short and simple – no.”
  • “A person is either honest or a liar. The Truth is not conditional. Half-truths are lies.”
  • “Never acceptable. Persuasion is a positively reinforced message through fact and data driven decisions.”
  • “just don’t do it.”

These thoughts outline an archetype: the impeccably honest salesperson who never lies, never distorts, and never withholds facts and information. Unfortunately, that archetype represents an impossibly high bar. Try any of them out on a newbie rep. Chances are, he or she will flunk day one on the job. Same for days two and three – assuming they get that far. And experienced reps will just roll their eyes. “Get a grip, pal!”

“Just don’t do it.” If only things were that simple. For hundreds of years, the meaning of honesty has been debated by legal scholars, judged in courts, and mulled by philosophers. Honesty is difficult to define. One reason we often pad the word with adjectives: pure honesty, partial honesty, brutal honesty, radical honesty, morally honest, and mostly honest. The same for truth and lies. Few would argue that white lies aren’t acceptable, or that honest facts aren’t used for fabricating illusion.

One person’s bald-faced lie is someone else’s minor distortion. Should things be any different in selling? Is there something magical or different about sales that invites draconian edicts like these? Emphatically, no. Lying appears the “new normal” in selling because by these standards, lying is . . . pretty normal. And it’s hardly new.

The advocates of “no lying” need to abandon their idealized interpretations of truth purity because they are divorced from selling reality. A major reason is that the default rhetoric of marketing and sales tends toward certainty – especially for describing outcomes and results. We favor concrete terms like definitely, will, guaranteed, and proven. No rep wins the boss’s approval by adopting mealier – but more honest – terms like probably, possibly, could, and might. I challenge anyone to find a Chief Sales Officer willing to trade off persuasive power for a sworn commitment to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“Never acceptable.” If marketers followed pure honesty to the letter, the first thing on the chopping block would be storytelling. I have yet to read one sales story that hasn’t been factually creative, at best. The second thing to go would be “case studies,” since they are never as objective as the name implies.

Admonishing salespeople to “never lie,” only creates dissonance and goal conflict. Managers manufacture failure by insisting their reps behave “100% honestly,” while holding a hatchet over their necks as motivation to achieve goal. Inevitably, the rep must choose. And sadly, saying “I got fired for doing the right thing for my customer” doesn’t merit an invitation for a second job interview. Sales Culture Training 101: “No matter what, make quota.” Message, received.

That’s not the only problem. When “never lie” absolutism exists, ethical risks lurk nearby. Absolutism crushes debate and discussion. And when it comes to honesty and ethical behavior toward customers, nuanced conversations are sorely needed. The problem with these LinkedIn comments is that there’s no room for interpretation.

At its most atavistic, selling is persuasion. And persuasion requires distortion. Distortion of fact, distortion of meaning, distortion of reality and urgency. Over beer, we can hold a simpatico conversation to parse the differences between distortion and lies. We can exchange information about what we allow ourselves to do and say when representing our companies, and the honesty lines we refuse to cross. We can talk about the influence of David Hume and Diogenes. One thing is certain: neither our honesty interpretations nor our ethical boundaries will be identical.

According to these absolutists, distortion and lying are equivalent. My recommendation: don’t follow their advice. If you want your customer to take action – say, for example, to buy from you and not from your competitor – you must make sure they believe that it’s fully in their interest to do so, and that ordering now is a priority. You can’t do that without tweaking reality to promote your point of view.

For salespeople, balancing honesty and persuasion means walking a hair-thin line. Same for ego and empathy. All are needed for success, but they collide and clunk against one another. “It’s a miracle anyone can do this job,” Philip Broughton wrote in his book, The Art of the Sale. No joke.

I am not a proponent of lying as a sales tactic. I am not advocating deceit and misrepresentation as a business practice. And I am not saying that anything goes as long as it results in revenue. Far from it. I am saying that marketers and salespeople should strive for honesty and high ethical standards in their professional conduct. I am also saying that to be effective, salespeople need a rational basis for ethical consideration, and “never lie” undermines that goal. We need salespeople who are strong critical thinkers, not sycophantic believers.

A personal confession: I have made sales lies. Repeatedly. Here are three:

1. “I can’t offer you a lower price.” Lie. Prices are quite easy for vendors to massage, and rarely – if ever – is it impossible to offer a lower price, as “can’t” connotes. Customers know it. Everyone knows it.

What’s more truthful? How about, 1) “it’s not convenient for me reduce my price,” or 2) “if I allow you to buy at the lower price, my profit margins will erode, and our CFO will get angry with me,” or 3) “I get higher commission selling at list price, and I need the income this quarter.”

2. “Buying my company’s product is the best use of your resources right now.” Lie. I’ve never been 100% sure when using superlatives, yet I still use them. Besides, with this lie, I have rarely had full visibility into every project a company is considering anyway. So I’m not being fully honest when making the claim.

What’s more truthful? 1) “based on my analysis of the numbers you provided me, you should probably meet your expected financial return,” 2) “My competitor’s product does pretty much the same thing, so you can’t go wrong choosing either one of us,” 3) “I understand why you want to implement my proposal now, but based on what I have seen, you’d be much better off solving [name of project that my company doesn’t provide a product for].”

3. “Our machines have highest performance rating in the industry.” Lie, by omission. But still a lie. Is highest performance rating based on MTBF (mean time between failures)? Longevity of components? Quality of output? All of these? And where was the benchmarking performed? – In house? Through an objective third-party? And there’s that superlative problem again: highest.

What’s more truthful? 1) “We have the highest performance rating in one category.” 2) “We performed the benchmarking in-house.” 3) “Our in-house test results always look better than what you will achieve in the field.”

I harbor no remorse for committing any of these. But if you’re into “never lie,” try some of the more truthful statements with your customers, and let me know the results.

I want to head off a concern right now. You might already be thinking, “These are trivial lies. They are not the kind that get anyone into trouble.” Fair point. But then I’d urge you to identify what type of lies really get your dander up. Lies like telling customers, “We have offices in 28 states,” when those “offices” are actually indirect employees working virtually from their homes? Or, my favorite, “Our software has over 48 installs,” when two-thirds of them are dormant beta accounts that have made no commitment to purchase? Smile, wink. These statements are kinda, sorta true, and because of that, they stink around the edges. I don’t like them. Mostly, I get annoyed with the CMO’s explanation, which often begins, “Well, technically . . .”

Maybe we need a new taxonomy for marketing lies. Here’s what I propose:

Class I lies: run-of-the-mill marketing fluff, flamboyant writing, and expected braggadocio. The claims prospects are already jaded to. “Four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” Or “We’re the industry leader!” There’s really no foul for broadcasting any of this stuff. If any prospect bases a purchase decision solely on such claims, well, shame on them.

Class II lies: deeper, more egregious transgressions. Stuff that generates fines, lawsuits, and bitterly negative Yelp reviews. Example: “Our brain games help users achieve full potential in every aspect of life,” which got Lumosity fined by the FTC. The FTC asserted there was no scientific proof to substantiate that claim, along with others Lumosity made.

Class III lies: I call these BHAL’s (Big Hairy Audacious Lies), because of their potential to directly and significantly influence a customer’s buying decision. Lies that obscure the true cost of procurement or operations. Lies that patently overstate the capability of a product, or promise a result that can never be delivered. The Fyre Festival debacle resulted from a series of Class III lies.

If your business objective is to instill ethics and integrity in your biz-dev organization, don’t fret over Class I lies. Just keep your eye on them to make sure they don’t become more serious. Propagating Class II and Class III lies, on the other hand, substantially increase business and stakeholder risks, and they must be carefully managed. Here are some important practices:

  1. Recognize that honesty and truth are subject to interpretation, and there’s often ambiguity in selling situations.
  2. Model ethical, honest behavior from the top echelons of the company. Executives who are not vocal proponents, or who are not rigorous about their own honest conduct cannot expect any different from employees.
  3. Encourage internal discussions among staff about what they encounter in sales and marketing situations, and how they make choices.
  4. Offer guidelines to staff when rules don’t fit. Avoid vague requests like “don’t be too salesy,” or “don’t over-promise.” Instead, ask your staff to think about what’s ethical in selling, and to always consider, “what is the right thing to do?”
  5. Don’t penalize honesty by creating conflict. It happens more than companies realize. If Wells Fargo taught us anything, it’s that a salesperson should never have to decide between being honest with customers, or keeping his or her job.
  6. Provide clarity for what’s restricted by documenting them in writing, and reviewing them routinely with your staff. The Class III lies that significantly influence customer decisions, that directly contradict product specifications or contract terms, that inflate or falsify an employee’s credentials. The restrictions should also include what can – and cannot – be said about competitors, performance benchmarking data, pricing commitments, and other financial disclosures.

P. T. Barnum, one of the greatest salespeople who ever lived, was adamantly against fraudulent selling, but he recognized the subtle nuances about honesty and lying:

“An honest man who arrests public attention will be called a “humbug,”‘ but he is not a swindler or an impostor. If, however, after attracting crowds of customers by his unique displays, a man foolishly fails to give them a full equivalent for their money, they never patronize him a second time, but they very properly denounce him as a swindler, a cheat, an impostor; they do not, however, call him a ‘humbug.’ He fails, not because he advertises his wares in an [outrageous] manner, but because, after attracting crowds of patrons, he stupidly and wickedly cheats them.”

As Broughton observed, “There is evidently a line here somewhere between humbug and deception, between Barnumesque hype and outright lies, between reading your customers to give them what they need and exploiting their weakness to your own advantage.”

I hope the “never lie” proponents figure that out.

Companies That Abuse Privacy Might Feel Consumer Fury – Again

Saturday, 12 August 2017 01:32
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The company Ashley Madison offers an audacious capability: extramarital affairs.  “Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating,” proclaimed the company’s marketing pitch in 2015. “Have an Affair today on Ashley Madison. Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday [sic] looking for an affair . . . With Our affair guarantee package we guarantee you will find the perfect affair partner.”

A great value prop for those seeking such experiences – until July of that year, when hackers broke into the company’s data files.  The thieves coined a name for themselves, The Impact Team. A modest appellation, considering the extensive collateral damage their activities produced.

Mission accomplished. The Impact Team’s cyber-haul included 25 gigabytes of profiles describing the people who signed up for Ashley Madison’s services. Many records included email addresses ending with .gov and .mil (the domain extensions for the US government and Department of Defense, respectively), which stoked curiosity, to put it mildly. Had the hackers compromised the US nuclear launch codes, there would have been less panic in Washington.

But unlike most hackers, The Impact Team was motivated by more than extracting ransom. Impact Team ostensibly wanted to preserve morality, citing that the reason for the hacking was Ashley Madison’s facilitation of marital infidelity. Another website, EstablishedMen, was also targeted. Both are owed by parent company Avid Life Media (ALM), which rebranded as Rubylife in July, 2016. “Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags [sic] and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers wrote. The Impact Team threatened to expose the identities of Ashley Madison’s customers if ALM did not shut down the websites.

There was more. The hackers complained that although ALM charged users $19 to delete personal data from the Ashley Madison website, the company did not fulfill its promise – not fully, anyway. Instead, ALM simply relocated the “deleted” records to its backend servers. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver,” the hackers said. Clearly, the hackers feel that philanderers deserve honest treatment from vendors.

Despite getting caught with their cyber-drawers down, “Avid Life Media defiantly ignored the warnings and kept both sites online [Ashley Madison and EstablishedMen] after the breach, promising customers that it had increased the security of its networks. That wouldn’t matter for the customers whose data had already been taken. Any increased security would be too little too late for them. Now [those customers] face the greatest fallout from the breach: public embarrassment, the wrath of angry partners who may have been victims of their cheating, possible blackmail and potential fraud from anyone who may now use the personal data and bank card information exposed in the data dump,” according to a story in Wired Magazine published shortly after the incident (Hackers Finally Post Stolen Ashley Madison Data, August 18, 2015).

The Ashley Madison hacking was not the first incident involving a vendor that failed to adequately protect customer information from hackers. There was TJX, parent company of retailer TJ Maxx in 2003 (94 million stolen records), Sony PSN in 2011 (77 million), Target Stores in 2013 (70 million), Home Depot in 2014 (56 million), and eBay in 2014 (145 million). In fact, of The Nine Biggest Data Breaches of All Time (Huffington Post, August 20, 2015), Ashley Madison doesn’t even make the list.

But if someone maintained a list titled Most Awful, Ashley Madison would rise to the top. Ashley Madison scared the bleep out of everyone because the incident compromised not only financial information, but lifestyle preferences – the kind an individual would not likely share with friends or family. Purloined credit card numbers can be deactivated, but evidence of promiscuity and related information, well, once liberated, those horses aren’t heading back to the barn.

Should companies care about protecting personal customer information? The question is not rhetorical. By being opaque with customers about what they were doing with their sensitive data, Ashley Madison apparently didn’t care enough. Some could say they didn’t care at all. And their cyber-barriers weren’t insurmountable for the dedicated hackers on The Impact Team. Post-Ashley Madison, people began to think about their information in the IT cloud, and the associated risks to personal privacy. “Click to submit!” – software developers have made sharing personal data all too easy.

People worried about where their private information goes, where it’s stored, and who might have access to it. They began to imagine voyeurs who might crave such information, and they wondered what criminals could do with it. Consumers realized they couldn’t entrust their privacy to firewalls, encryption, secure data storage, and other jargony techno-obfuscations that marketers routinely use to sweeten their “privacy assurances.” Poignantly, Ashley Madison meant that most consumers did not need any imagination to understand the outcomes when vendors are lackadaisical about data governance.

Customer worry becomes a marketing worry. If customers can’t trust that their privacy won’t be abused, they won’t trust the many mechanisms that happen in online commerce, notably, allowing their primary information and data exhaust  to be collected, stored, and analyzed. If – when – that happens, marketers will experience a setback in solving a perennial problem: Finding the likeliest buyers. Right now, marketers depend on both to fuel their ravenous lead-generation engines, and to close transactions. With every data hacking, regulators raise their hackles, and customers become ever warier. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” The same for customers when their trust and privacy are abused.

Fury – aka The Do Not Call Registry. In the ’80’s and ’90’s marketers got increasing blowback from agonized customers who felt their privacy had been violated, a development that directly contributed to the US Federal Trade Commission establishing the Do Not Call Registry in 2003. The registry’s intention was to curtail what became a reviled business practice: marketers using telephone contact to prospect for new business. Many telemarketing calls were made to residences, and numbers-driven marketers didn’t care about customer experience, often prescribing the calls to occur at dinner time, when prospects were more likely to be home.

Telemarketing began with the advent of the telephone, according to Wikipedia. It flourished in the 1970’s, when marketers got savvier about effective tactics, which were widely shared as “best practices.” That was the beginning of its demise.

The primary customer data needed was culled from lists of residential phone numbers, and ZIP Code directories, all available to the public. For marketers, the telemarketing sales channel became stupid-easy to switch on, and – this is crucial –  wicked-hard for customers to avoid. Before caller-id and call blocking, the only choice for a customer when a telemarketer called was to not answer the phone, and wonder whether they had just missed something important. Vendors became addicted to the low costs and revenue results. For senior executives, self-regulating one’s cash cow did not have wide appeal.

Yet, Do Not Call was a bellwether in the customer fight for privacy, and it caught on like wildfire. While today, it appears that Do Not Call doesn’t have sufficient penal claws to deter vendors from flouting its provisions (my home regularly receives numerous daily phone solicitations, despite being on the registry), its symbolic message is stunning.  Today, there are 217 million numbers on the list. Since its inception, that averages to 42,465 numbers added per day for 14 years. I consider that an “opt-in” success story that should make any CMO drool with envy, albeit for the wrong reasons. The message to marketers: “Do not intrude on my privacy. Do not abuse my personal information. Because if you do, you’ll lose your privilege. Sincerely, Your Customers.”

When it comes to privacy, marketers have no scruples. None. COPPA, The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was enacted to prohibit the collection and use of personal data from children under 13 years old. But there’s a problem: “More than 50 percent of Google Play apps targeted at children under 13 – we examined more than 5,000 of the most popular (many of which have been downloaded millions of times) – appear to be failing to protect data,” writes Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy group at the International Computer Science Institute, in a Washington Post article, We tested apps for kids. Half failed to protect their data (August 7, 2017).  For example, when parents download an app from Google’s Designed for Families section in the Google Play store, they assume data about their child (or children) remains safe. Turns out, that’s a bad assumption.

Which kid-generated data is compromised? Device serial numbers (which are often associated with location data), email addresses, and other “personally identifiable information,” according to Egelman, who wrote that his company found such data had been transmitted to third-party advertisers, and that the nature of the data meant that those companies could engage in long-term tracking of these children.Fortunately, Egelman has developed a website for parents to check the “privacy behaviors of the apps” his company has automatically tested. Just when we thought it was safe to allow our children to stay inside and play on the computer . . .

Personal privacy: why ongoing consumer trust isn’t assured. “Today your data can be of four kinds: data you share with everyone, data you share with friends and coworkers, data you share with various companies (wittingly or not), and data you don’t share,” writes Pedro Domingos in his book, The Master Algorithm. As consumers, we’re betting that as companies like Facebook, Amazon, and others gain more data, their learning algorithms improve, returning more value to us. But Domingos says that the “problem is that Facebook is also free to do things with the data and the models that are not in your interest, and you have no way to stop it.”

“When we say we’ll protect your data, you must believe us! . . or not.” Today’s marketers extoll privacy in their customer messaging. After all, they smell money. “Onavo Protect for Android helps you take charge of how you use mobile data and protect your personal info. Get smart notifications when your apps use lots of data and secure your personal details,” the copy on Onavo’s website assures us. But Facebook, which spent $150 million to acquire Onavo four years ago, hasn’t been fully transparent what it does with the data. One thing is certain: Facebook didn’t plunk down $150 million because they fancied the name Onavo. “Facebook is able to glean detailed insights about what consumers are doing when they are not using the social network’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram,” according to an article in The Washington Post, Facebook’s Affinity for Copying Seen as Stifling Innovation (August 11, 2017) . How private is the data? Will Facebook use it for benign purposes? Will customers experience harm? I don’t know, and the answers aren’t provided in corporate fine print and written disclaimers.

In another example, this year Princess Cruises announced its Ocean Medallion bracelet that promises passengers a unique personalized travel experience:

“It’s cruise planner meets concierge — a guide that you can access everywhere — on touchscreens throughout the ship, your stateroom TV and your own mobile devices. Ocean Compass helps you navigate your ship and your cruise, like streamlining the boarding process, personalized shore excursions invitations, ordering your favorite drink and more . . . Upload your documentation and set your preferences ahead of time so you can swiftly walk on board and communicate everything your ship needs to know about you.”

And:

“Customize your personal Ocean Tagalong™ by body shape, color, pattern and marks (like tattoos) to best reflect your “alter ego”. This responsive digital companion follows you from initial registration to the end of your cruise (as well as rejoin you on future cruises). You’ll find it online within your profile, during interactive PlayOcean games like Tagalong Sprint, as well as through Ocean Portals found onboard Medallion Class ships. Tagalongs even evolve throughout the cruise, reflecting your unique personality and interactions, and will collect ‘charms’ that show off your achievements.”

To me, Ocean Medallion is a marketing name for sophisticated surveillance technology, and there’s “Ewwwwwwwwww!” by the bucket load throughout this cheery write up. Clearly, I’m not the type of customer Princess wants to reach, and I’m sure they’ve heard similar sentiments from others. They’re looking for a much different prospect. One who absolutely, positively cannot stand to separate from technology. Not even for a minute. I can distill Princess’s prose into a single sentence: “We know much about you even before you begin your vacation, and we track you from the time you come aboard, until the time you disembark.”

Where does Ocean Mediallion’s digital information go, who sees it, who uses it, and for what purposes? That’s not spelled out anywhere I looked on the company’s website, though I have little doubt that they have PhD data scientists who know. And it’s not reassuring that Carnival hasn’t updated their privacy policy since December 5, 2014, according to its privacy policy page. Just finding that out required a circuitous content journey. Good thing I liked the photos.

In today’s digital era, batches of delicate personal customer information are produced, captured, selected, sub-selected, curated, sorted, stored, compiled, combined, listed, cut, “value-added,” repackaged, warehoused, transmitted, sold, and shared, like rail cars of soybeans. Your data, e-shot, helter-skelter to the world! A massive logistics system operating in subterfuge, trafficking the data minutia of a human being’s existence, one individual at a time. Without industry self-enforcement, strong governance policies, and legal restrictions, tell me there’s not another Ashley Madison-type wreck about to happen, or already underway.

There’s an entrepreneurial opportunity here, in case anyone wants to step in. Pedro Domingos suggested one in how he envisions a new business model for privacy protection:

“The kind of company I’m envisaging would do several things in return for a subscription fee. It would anonymize your online interactions, routing them through its servers and aggregating them with its other users’. It would store all the data from your life in one place – down to hour 24/7 Google Glass video stream, if you ever get one. It would learn a complete model of you and your world and continually update it. And it would use the model on your behalf, always doing exactly what you would, to the best of the model’s ability. The company’s basic commitment to you is that your data and your model will never be used against your interests. Such a guarantee can never be foolproof – you yourself are not guaranteed to never do anything against your interests, after all. But the company’s life would depend on it as much as a bank’s depends on the guarantee that it won’t lose your money, so you should be able to trust it as much as you would trust your bank.”

I wonder whether a company can honestly commit to never acting against a customer’s interests, when those interests inevitably change. Still, I like his entrepreneurial vision.  In the meantime, Domingos asks, “Who should you share your data with? That’s perhaps the most important question of the twenty-first century.”

Author’s note: This article is the second in a series about consumer privacy. You can read the first article, In the Digital Revolution, Customers Have Nothing to Lose But Their Privacy by clicking here. In an upcoming article, I’ll outline important keys for corporate data governance.

© Contrary Domino 2013-2016.
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