The self-regulation, cost, and data and technology expertise needed for privacy governance requires that brands keep investing in marketing data and tech.

How can brands strike the balance between delivering personalized content to customers and meeting data privacy requirements? What if the two aren’t at odds?

Many people think of the digital age and the technology to come as the end to life as we know it, especially when it comes to certain brands or industries. The collapse of brick-and-mortar stores is a fear many harbor. Big brother comes to mind. Robots taking over jobs is an AI detractor's bread and butter. This begs the question – Should we fear and resist a digital future? Or, does a digital future give us the opportunity to grow, change and do better?

Making a brand’s voice conversational for all audiences is a tall ask, and some brands are willing to lose an audience in order to gain a new one. While mass marketing sometimes makes a sizeable voice change from one campaign to another, more personal channels allow for a more gradual evolution, which could make the mass marketing shift a lot less unexpected. The desired outcome won’t occur overnight, and once it’s done, it may even take some time to resonate. But if the planning has been done, and the considerations have been made, the evolution must continue.

As marketers, we look at the communications we make through rose-colored lenses. Honestly, who could blame us? We dig tirelessly for insights, carefully craft strategic approaches, painstakingly construct authentic messaging and refine round after round of creative revisions to ensure a result that’s note perfect. The final product is a carefully packaged email bursting with relevancy and value for some lucky recipient on the other end. But after all the love we pour into the process, some customers just won’t open their emails.

A personalized experience over one that isn’t will generally be more meaningful to people. For it to have meaningful business value, companies face the dual task of both scaling personalization and deepening its application.

This article is going to be about the traits existent in courageous brands as it pertains to their marketing efforts. Philanthropy, worker compensation, making investments that are socially and/or environmentally conscious, all those things are certainly courageous, but that stuff should be a no brainer. So let’s mosey on past those tenants and talk about what courageous brands do in terms of marketing.

Nike's latest anniversary ad campaign contained all the ingredients necessary to pique the attention of a nation where social debate and polarizing opinions have become the daily fare of talking heads and social feeds.

Customer journeys are prevalent today for good reason. They’re a distinct improvement over the previous marketing era— one too corporately self-serving and not customer centric enough. The danger with anything that becomes accepted, however, is that it stops being questioned.

Pharma’s blockbuster launches have trained marketing’s smooth muscle memory. Brands like Prozac, Plavix, Lipitor and Viagra exploded under a frequency model that combined strong sales forces with iconic advertising campaigns and forests of printed collateral to create fame. However, as Jeremy Bullmore has pointed out, there’s something in the nature of real fame that means it needs to be indiscriminate.