Market to the opportunity
Breach preparedness might not seem an especially exciting task to take on, but it’s crucial to the success of your vision as a CMO, and to the overall solvency of your brand. You need to make sure you’re proactively marketing your preparedness and general data hygiene practices.Make the measures you’ve taken part of your overall demand gen toolkit – central to outbound campaigns and promotions, reinforced in calls you take with potential customers and clients. This isn’t just good business sense; this is common sense for the world we live in, where buyers are more educated than ever before on issues surrounding data privacy and anxious to have conversations on breach preparedness. I can’t tell you how many RFPs I’ve seen that foreground privacy questions and considerations.
Make it a point to market compliance at every juncture of the customer journey. Customers and partners can be confident you’ll protect the data they provide you and will only use it in manners that are transparent and for the manner intended.
Invest in privacy and compliance certification
In this increasingly connected age, measures around privacy and compliance aren’t simply nice-to-haves; they’re must-haves. The ROI for a privacy certification might seem difficult to quantify, when the initial outlay looks large, but the cost to your brand without the investment is ten times higher, in the event especially of a breach (and ensuing backlash from customers).
Make privacy programs a priority – certifications, industry alliances and memberships, participation in working groups – and see to it the program you choose fits your organization’s size and unique data needs (especially if yours is an industry where data privacy is particularly paramount). There are affordable third-party solutions available to organizations of all sizes, from BBB Online to TrustE, and CMOs should make an effort to evaluate and exhaust their every option on this front. An ounce of prevention, remember, is worth a pound of cure.
Looking ahead
The data management and breach incident landscape is changing rapidly. Stay on top of the issues by engaging in industry resources and groups that can provide you updated information pertaining to all things privacy and data management. Ensure that privacy management is a core function within your organization and is supported by the c-suite, which means available budget that your business can leverage to adopt tools and services that make privacy stewardship a competitive edge for the organization.
Bottom line: a commitment to privacy is good for business and good for your users, and as the main steward of the customer experience, it’s up to you as CMO to cultivate a privacy program that can go the distance – supporting a more seamless brand experience, and increasing ROI long term.
Remember, not all data breaches are created equal – some are more painful than others. The good news? With these proactive steps you can limit the event and possible fallout, as well as demonstrate corporate governance during the difficult time of navigating the data breach resolution.