New EU-data protection laws and marketing research

One of the most significant current events that has the potential to impact market research is the development of a new European data protection policy. The new laws are due to take effect in 2018. They are important for two reasons. Firstly, data protection law is the most significant regulatory factor that impacts the day-to-day operation of marketing research. Many existing data protection laws were drafted before the use of the internet became widespread and are generally agreed to be ineffective in the light of technological advances and the corresponding change in uses of data. Secondly, these changes herald the start of a pan-European data protection policy. Given the interconnected nature of internet data, what impacts Europe has broader implications throughout the world, and many countries outside the EU are looking to adopt the European model of data protection. ESOMAR summarises the changes as follows.
European citizens get a whole set of new rights that market, opinion, and social research agencies and research clients alike will need to cater for. Ranging from a right to be forgotten, a right to object to profiling activities, a strengthened right to prior notification before data collection, a right to data portability, European citizens now have – more than ever – a right to know before, during and after you collect their data. These requirements will need to be incorporated into business practices if they are not already.
Another important development focusses on profiling, one of the most hotly contested points in the reform. Any profiling that may have a significant or legal effect on an individual has been banned by the reform, and in all cases European citizens have a right to object, including research. This may create a need to adapt how sampling activities are conducted as they would likely fall under the broad definition of profiling adopted by the negotiators.
In addition to rights for consumers, the new legislation could apply to any company collecting data on EU citizens – regardless of where they are based in the world. This has important implications for many US internet firms that serve EU-based customers, which will now need to follow the legislation rather than less stringent US laws. As part of the process of developing the legislation there was also a considerable amount of lobbying by professional research associations to ensure that legitimate research activity was not treated in the same way as direct marketing. Full details of the legislation and the role of ESOMAR in the process of developing legislation is available at the following address: https://www.esomar.org/utilities/news-multimedia/news.php?idnews=195

Does anonymity matter?

What if we were to create research methods where anonymity did not matter? Where clients could ask straight questions of customers on customer databases or customer websites, and get straight answers back from them? John Griffiths (www.planningaboveandbeyond.com) offers the view:
I am reminded of my induction into digital telephony over 20 years ago, where a technologist explained that by going digital, telephone companies had found a way to put voices and computer data into packets that they could send down a wire. Once they had made this jump, the challenge was to find ways to send data faster. Now thousands of people use the same wire at the same time to pass voice and data to each other in both directions in real time. While telephone stayed analogue we needed an operator to make a physical connection between two telephones, and while the two parties were using that single piece of wire no other information could be passed down that wire. That is where marketing research is stuck now. The analogue way to get trustworthy information from a participant is to set up a separate circuit isolated from everything else. Which makes it clunky, costly, slow and methodologically suspect. But what if client companies find that they can indeed get usable customer data without analogue circuitry? Supposing in a flurry of e-communications as a customer sends off for a new car brochure, they browse websites, watch ads on YouTube and Google Video and answer pop-up questionnaires before and after? Suppose car companies find ways for customers to browse information systems in the showroom to choose their cars and then integrate research capture. They could be gathering research data at the same time as selling. Unthinkable? Why ever not? This is called duplex information flow. All digital devices have had it for years, but marketing research hasn’t. Playing ‘peekaboo’ with identity is a poor way to protect an industry as established as marketing research. If the industry does not find a way around the anonymity issue, we may be like the rest of analogue technology and find ourselves consigned to history. The client can talk directly to customers and prospects and they willingly talk back, even initiating an exchange. So, what was your role again?