Marketing Meets Blockchain: What’s A Fair Price For Customer Data?
For everything from insurance to supply chain management, blockchain technology promises to upend traditional business practices – sometimes in the most surprising ways.
Even the modern marketer will not be spared from the blockchain revolution. On a recent episode of Internet talk radio show Coffee Break with Game-Changers, presented by SAP, a panel of three leading industry experts discussed the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt marketing.
During the show, titled Blockchain Technology: Turning Marketing on its Head host Bonnie D. Graham moderated an energized, technology-focused discussion that revolved around a central question: What if the customer charges the marketer for access to his or her data in the blockchain?
For marketers long in search of a unified customer profile– that Holy Grail of marketing that provides a holistic picture of the customer, as mined from reams of marketing data – this question is sure to give serious cause for thought. Panelist Jeremy Epstein, CEO at Never Stop Marketing, summarized what this means for the future of marketing: “In a blockchain world, marketers will have to earn customer permission in an entirely new way. Identity will be controlled by the users.”
For those not familiar with the concept, blockchain technology is the infrastructure that forms the underpinning ledger of the Bitcoin crypto-currency, a technological marvel unto itself that is currently more highly valued than an ounce of gold. The decentralized network of computers and protocols that form a blockchain provide increased privacy and security for all data that resides therein. The encrypted nature of the blockchain puts the control over access to personal data squarely in the hands of the individual user.
“In a blockchain world, you’re going to have a shared data layer worldwide where the information is put into a blockchain and kept there,” Epstein explained. “But the control of that information will reside with each of us. For example, I as a customer will grant or revoke access to my personal information to a given company on a need-to-know basis.”
This is a vastly different approach from the current marketing process model of capturing customer data, storing it in databases, mining it, and possibly selling it to a third party. “It really is the inversion of the user model,” said Joel Monegro, investment analyst at Union Square Ventures.
