The Innovation Diaries

Putting your money where your mouth is remains a delicate balancing act for any brand. Putting your ID where your company’s brand is could be viewed by some as bordering on the insane. Not for Todd Davis. The CEO of LifeLock, an identity-theft prevention company, advertises his social security number on the homepage of LifeLock’s website.

Although hackers have had a field day with his details so far, with Yahoo reporting theft of his identity, it seems to neatly carve up the audience: from sniggering cynics to first-hand victims turned loyalists. With more and more companies keeping mounting number of details on computer drives, whirring away in back rooms of customer service centres, how exactly do we expect brands to safeguard their consumers’ details?

Perhaps we should revolutionise the question: how can brands ask for, capture and use insightful details from their consumers that would not expose them to the risk of identity theft?

What is captured at the moment by organisations on their consumers’ identity is often irrelevant to their brands. Ask any organisation about their top 10 clients and someone will be hurried off the corridor to the finance department to pull out the most recent sales report. If in luck, there will be a random assortment of clinical data to go with the report; billing addresses, credit card details, payment history etc.

However, which of these data entries will provide inspirational insight for innovation? Or which of these sizeable clients would really contribute to the value or perception of the brand? What about the loyalist, minimal spend client that has recommended you and your brand several times over the last six months? For brands to mobilise truly valuable information that leads to deep and meaningful consumer insights they will need to leave the databases whirring, close the door on them and start asking different things altogether. From the basic “Would you recommend me?” through to “How can we get you to…” brands can build unique consumer identities that drive the brand forward without the risk of identity theft.

And just to be clear: identity theft isn’t theft at all. It is really impersonation leading to fraud.

Whilst we wait for a brand to take the challenge of capturing relevant but safe data, anyone fancy impersonating Todd Davis?