When hotels ask people to share information about themselves, people are willing to share their data when there’s some meaningful value in doing so. Some of the things constitute value are offering something of monetary value, doing something that would save them time, showing up in the right moments and not in the wrong moments, and also providing information that could be educational or even entertaining.
And a good example of that is somebody who’d shared information with a hotel about their family size, their available budget and their destination, and they then received messages that were actually tailored according to that information and they really appreciated that the company had used their information in such a sophisticated way to make the messages relevant. And they found that those subsequent emails were continuing to add value to them long after the original interaction and transaction.
People want to feel in control of their data like they want to feel in control of any other parts of their lives.
The way that brands can put customers in control is partly by making their relationship with their data manageable, and that starts off by making sure they’re collecting the right user preferences at the point of sign up, enabling people to easily change those preferences and also just to step away and opt out any time that they like.
We all share data with dozens, if not hundreds, possibly even thousands of companies, and that can be a very difficult thing for us all to keep track of. People often don’t think it was enough to have consented to share their data with some company in the past. They really want to remember having done so in order for it to count. Hotels could perhaps more often contact customers to remind them what data they shared, why they shared it, when they shared it, what it’s being used for. By reminding people about what they shared and why it makes that person feel better about the relationship and more trusting in the brand and its ethics.
What does this mean for marketers?
Privacy is a really complex space where there’s all sorts of nuanced behaviors and attitudes, and sometimes these things are contradictory. What we find is that if marketers can make experiences for their customers meaningful, manageable and memorable, that that all adds up to giving customers a feeling of control. Our experience shows that when people feel in control, they feel that ads from a hotel were twice as relevant and they felt three times as emotionally positive about them. What this suggests is that privacy and performance don’t need to be at odds with each other.