Is your privacy notice aligned with your brand values?

All too often privacy notices are created by privacy teams, composed of lawyers and tech leaders. The upshot of this is that many are often couched in legalese and sometimes can run to pages of incomprehensible text.

Our challenge to organisations is to involve the marketing team in the drafting and creation of the privacy notice to ensure it reflects the brand values and is written in a style and tone that aligns with the expectations of customers.

Savvy consumers demand more

A growing shift in consumer opinion has acted as a catalyst for forward-thinking companies to look again at their privacy notices, questioning not only if they are fit for purpose, but whether they reflect a company’s brand values and aspirations.

Clear and transparent messaging

A consistent message coming out of our latest Privacy Made Positive® research (conducted most recently with 3,000 US consumers in 2023) underlined how consumers are looking for clear and straightforward messaging from a privacy notice. Of those we polled, around 85% stressed that good, transparent notices are very important to them having trust in the brand.

Privacy notices matter. Our research indicated that privacy notices are read especially by the young who are most likely to seek out and rely on these communications.

Transparency is also key. The consumer should understand what personal data is being collected and why the company wants to access it. Customers want assurance that their data will be used in a responsible way and not sold on to third parties.

The value and importance of clear, straightforward communication cannot be overstated. If you sense that there is a disconnect between your brand’s overarching marketing messages and its privacy notices, then an obvious first step is to ask your marketing team for input to foster a closer connection to your brand’s existing voice. Why waste the time and effort spent developing and refining the brand messaging to consumers by defaulting mostly to the legal requirements when communicating privacy to your customers?

Not just words, there are other ways to make privacy more accessible

A privacy notice is more than just words. There is also a need to consider the user journey. For more ‘edgy’ consumer-facing brands, this could be in the form of a pop-up with the type of language used in the rest of the site. For more conservative companies, it may be more formal.

The design of the notice, the colours, the typeface used and the way opt-in options are presented, all needed to be carefully planned and constantly re-assessed. Given that so much content is consumed via video, considering this format is also relevant.

Younger consumers want transparency. But their preferred medium is unlikely to be written text. Would a popup, video or infographic better demonstrate that you have thought about privacy and are trying to create a trust relationship with your customers?

Another increasingly popular option is the layered privacy option. This entails providing privacy information to consumers in digestible chunks, so they can consume it in small parts, rather than wading through a weighty document as their only option.

Conclusion

The challenge for organisations is to take the privacy notice to a new level and match, or even exceed, the expectations of consumers. In many ways privacy notices are ‘low hanging fruit’, but they can be the start of a collaboration where marketing teams and other departments overhaul privacy strategies to ensure they are ready for today’s increasingly savvy customers.