Data power comes with responsibilities A

t first glance, Cristiano Ronaldo and Ariana Grande appear to have little in common. One’s a superstar footballer locked in a perennial battle with Lionel Messi to be crowned the greatest player of all time. The other is a multiplatinum, Grammy Award-winning recording singer-songwriter and one-time child star of Nickelodeon.

But what they share is the almost unrivalled power of their influence. The scope of that influence is evidenced by their ability to pull in around $1 million per sponsored Instagram post, with only reality TV star and make-up mogul Kylie Jenner able to command more.

While it was undoubtedly the emergence and subsequent pervasiveness of social media that spawned this decidedly modern definition of influence, the concept itself has always been a powerful weapon within the marketer’s armoury. This is because influence is natural. People are neurologically hardwired to be social. Indeed, influence is as natural to our social world as gravity is to our physical world. Behavioural science increasingly demonstrates how, as social beings, we are constantly influenced by something or someone.

Almost all human choices can be swayed. It is for this reason that influence is one of the most foundational tasks of the marketing department.

Marketing influence can undoubtedly be used as a force for good. Former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a firm believer of this power, having pronounced in 1931 that “the general raising of standards in modern civilisation among all groups of people during the past half century would have been impossible without that spreading of knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising.”

Recent advances in science and technology have further empowered marketing’s social persuasion capabilities. The most obvious example is the increasing use of advanced analytics tools to make sense of the explosion in customer data that has accompanied the rapid growth in use of both the internet and social media.

Know everything

While today’s marketers not only have more data about their customers than ever before, they arguably have more data about their customers than those customers have about themselves. And Roosevelt would probably be rather less impressed with how this mountain of personal data is sometimes used ...

The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be underestimated in this regard. Advanced analytics solutions deliver incredible insights into customer behaviour, while simultaneously using these insights to alter the context of choice and cause people to act in certain ways. For example, if a company prefers a customer to choose alternative A, it can use behavioural insights to determine what design elements will increase the probability of the customer making that choice.

Whether that should be classed as “influence” or “manipulation” is certainly open to debate, but it is often dependent on individual circumstances. However, to ensure that marketing teams use their powerful skills of influence in ways that engender customer trust, chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their executive partners should formalise their marketing ethics.

Many businesses are already acting in positive trust-enhancing ways. Some ethics-related practices, such as data privacy, are of high importance for all companies due to regulatory requirements as well as the degree of public scrutiny and mistrust surrounding these. Beyond regulation, companies must consider both the risk and the opportunity in order to determine the urgency of developing a more extensive code of conduct.

With advanced analytics at their fingertips, today’s marketers have unprecedented power to influence decisions. But as a revered philosopher once famously said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And whether you wish to attribute that almost universal cultural maxim to Voltaire, Churchill, or Spider-Man himself, he certainly had a point.

■ Jyoti Lalchandani is Group Vice-President and Regional Managing Director at IDC.