The Power of Trust: A Winning Privacy Strategy for Marketers

We’ve all experienced those moments as consumers — receiving an offer for something irrelevant or being addressed by the wrong name. For years now, I’ve received promotional emails and postcards from a global automotive brand addressed to someone named “Leighann Drake.” Neither I nor anyone in my family goes by that name, nor do we own a vehicle from that brand.

At first, it’s easy to brush this off as a harmless mistake, but as a consumer, it leaves me questioning the brand’s trustworthiness. Multiply this misstep by millions of households, and the stakes become much higher for brands. What do mistakes like these say about a company’s data strategy? How do they align with company goals for relevancy, efficiency and privacy compliance?

This isn’t just an anecdote — it’s a symptom of a much larger issue facing marketers today. Disconnected data strategies, outdated practices and a lack of trust in data foundations are holding many brands back from delivering meaningful, privacy-first experiences at scale. 

Marketing today is more complex than ever. Consumers have grown to expect every interaction to be relevant, ethical and private. Yet, marketers face a barrage of challenges, including escalating costs, fragmented engagement points, and an overwhelming volume of information competing for consumer attention. 

Adding to the complexity are organizational silos and misaligned priorities between marketing, compliance and technical teams. These disconnects make it difficult to create a seamless experience, adapt to ever-changing regulations, and bring innovative ideas to life. Meanwhile, time-consuming, manual processes for managing campaigns slow down experimentation and limit marketers’ ability to deliver meaningful, differentiated value. The result? Teams are left navigating a growing gap between consumer expectations and their ability to deliver on those promises. 

Yet, not all is lost. Along with the evolution of privacy standards come innovations across data infrastructure that offer marketers a path forward. Organizations can take a three-pronged approach to developing privacy-first data strategies that help build trust, deliver relevance and drive responsible growth in an increasingly complex landscape.

Before we dive in, here’s a high level summary of what a privacy-first data strategy could do:

• Bring compliant campaigns to market in a fraction of the time

• Power all of your data-intensive marketing use cases from the same single compliant and pre-governed copy of data 

• Equip the cross-functional teams that power marketing initiatives (data, compliance and marketing teams) to be more efficient and purposeful with their skills 

Marketers often overlook the pivotal role they play in shaping their brand’s privacy strategy. The true definition of privacy extends far beyond highly technical and cryptographic transformations to secure data — it’s an opportunity to redefine how brands use data, responsibly and ethically, in interactions with consumers. It’s not just about adhering to a list of rules handed down by compliance teams either. It’s about absorbing the spirit of legislation and consumer expectation for value in a way that fosters trust.

Traditionally, for many organizations, privacy has been viewed as a responsibility shared by legal and IT teams. Legal teams focus on understanding, educating and enforcing rules in business terms, while IT teams work to strengthen data security through technical measures. The industry has been driven by rhetoric that prioritizes the broad and liberal use of data, emphasizing technical tasks like hashing, permuting and translating data for security against breach. This approach has largely overlooked a foundational priority: aligning data practices with consumer permissions, ensuring ethical data treatment, meaningful usage and tangible value exchange with the consumer.

Today, brands that truly embrace a privacy-centric approach understand that privacy is more than just data security — it’s about the ethical use of information. Privacy is a cornerstone of customer trust and loyalty, built on responsible data practices, data security and a transparent exchange of permission and preferences for meaningful value. When done right, compliance isn’t just a regulatory requirement — it becomes a strategic advantage, helping brands build a trusted data foundation to power marketing use cases with confidence. In fact, Deloitte's research indicates that 88% of customers who trust a brand will repurchase, and companies with high trust levels can outperform their peers by up to 400% in market value. 

Forward-thinking brands are weaving privacy into their broader business strategies and using it as a catalyst for customer engagement, innovation and sustainable growth. A privacy-centric approach can simplify compliance and also empowers marketers and analysts to move faster, scale efficiently and drive measurable impact.

For marketers, embracing privacy as more than just a compliance mandate requires a shift in mindset — from focusing on technical security measures to prioritizing ethical data usage. True privacy means ensuring every data point collected serves a purpose aligned with consumer expectations, delivering value in a way that fosters trust. By embedding transparency, consent and responsible data practices into marketing strategies, brands can build stronger relationships with their customers while maintaining compliance. A privacy-centric approach doesn’t just mitigate risk — it creates opportunities for sustainable growth, innovation and more meaningful consumer engagement.

"Modern marketers are seeing the outsized impact of privacy on their data-driven strategies. As third-party advertising identifiers become less available and consumers expect more control over their data, traditional customer engagement strategies are increasingly missing the mark," says Blake Brannon, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at OneTrust. "By shifting the focus from mere compliance to the responsible use of data—integrating privacy, consent, and governance into their data infrastructure—marketers can foster consumer trust while enhancing customer experiences. Aligning closely with technical teams and embedding responsible data practices into their martech stack not only unlocks the full potential of first-party data, but also reveals innovative ways to activate marketing insights, driving smarter, more ethical engagement strategies."

With a privacy-first culture established and aligned with operations and a strong foundation built to adapt to privacy shifts and uphold data subject rights, marketers and martech/adtech leaders must adopt a zero trust approach to their marketing use cases. By embedding preference and permission into a unified framework, organizations can confidently innovate, integrate with downstream destinations and partnerships, and unlock the full potential of their data while safeguarding consumer trust. 

For many companies, the shift to a privacy-first era comes after years of building, integrating and leveraging data across various partnerships and use cases. The longstanding practice of sharing and activating data freely is now creating new challenges as marketers navigate evolving regulations and changing consumer preferences. The growing complexity of privacy compliance has introduced layers of administrative burden, requiring teams to scrutinize, manage and validate data usage with every new rule or policy change. Even with the best intentions, these manual processes increase the risk of missteps and slow down marketing agility. As a result, privacy management has become a bottleneck, making it harder for teams to drive ethical, high-performing marketing outcomes at scale.

The organizations that are navigating this successfully will build a unified data foundation for better data control, simplified governance and streamlined privacy management. And many leading brands are using Snowflake to do it.

Snowflake’s platform empowers marketers to build a strong, privacy-first foundation to meet evolving consumer and regulatory demands. With Snowflake, you can bring your applications directly to your data. Combined with Snowflake Horizon’s built-in governance, privacy, security and compliance features, this creates a game-changing approach for marketers seeking to establish trust and deliver meaningful, privacy-centric customer experiences.

As use cases in the Modern Marketing Data Stack come to life, consumer consent data and legislative and use policies together give marketers their first pure value foundation designed to mitigate privacy risks while adhering to the commitments and rights of each consumer. Marketers now have new opportunities in audience discovery, data activation, partner collaboration and measurement. They can more efficiently and successfully move from siloed data and compliance practices to centralized, common data that is ready to activate/leverage. That unified data can be dynamically understood — efficiently and at scale — based on common parameters like marketer role, campaign context and geography.

Consumer consent preferences and data governance choices (and policies) can now be centrally managed, making it easier to leverage valuable technologies such as CDPs, data clean rooms and advertising platform deployments using unified underlying data with privacy choices and policy changes reflected across all deployments and use cases.

At its core, a privacy strategy unifies diverse teams with heterogeneous goals — marketing, compliance, IT and beyond. Its aim is to create efficiency and advantage in process, execution and performance by aligning experience and marketing teams with compliance and technical disciplines. A common framework among units not only elevates understanding for data deprecation and policy changes, but similarly allows marketers to convey experiential goals jointly with compliance considerations. The result is a unified framework that stands the test of time and thrives in a landscape of increasing limitation.

Privacy has traditionally been viewed as a responsibility limited to legal and IT teams, primarily focused on compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This conventional approach often centered on securing data through technical measures like hashing. However, the evolving privacy landscape demands a more holistic effort, requiring collaboration across all teams that interact with or utilize data. 

Forward-thinking marketers recognize that privacy isn’t just about compliance — it’s an opportunity to build consumer trust. By enhancing data practices, fostering responsible collaboration, and delivering personalized, relevant experiences, brands can demonstrate value while ensuring consumers feel safe and in control. 

This alignment not only strengthens trust but also unlocks new business opportunities. Whether enabling seamless expansion into new markets or improving engagement with protected consumer groups, a streamlined, privacy-first strategy fosters innovation without the risk of regulatory setbacks. Additionally, strong connections between organizations enhance efficiency and provide a competitive edge. Companies that prioritize privacy don’t just comply with the law — they anticipate and adapt to evolving regulations, positioning themselves as trusted partners in an increasingly privacy-conscious world. 

Marketers should establish a trust framework among the personnel who span across the end-to-end marketing lifecycle — marketers, data teams and compliance offices. Embedding trust-by-design considerations at the frontend of the marketing lifecycle can help ensure that all the steps and processes — from campaign execution to measurement and optimization — can operate in a governed and reliable fashion without having to re-evaluate and certify decisions later on.

They should also evaluate all downstream applications of data in marketing and bring permission and preference to the hub that powers the entirety of the plan. This will allow marketers to benefit from frontend tools and processes that leverage this construct without inheriting the risks of outdated, fragmented or noncompliant legacy systems.

Real change is often hard, but inaction also comes at a cost. A reinvented privacy strategy may be challenging to achieve, but failure to reinvent risks losing reputations, opportunities and efficiencies — and the trust consumers place in your brand.

The adoption of a privacy-first mindset is about stronger internal and external relationships that breed both strategic alignment and achievement of outcomes that are effective and ethical. Perhaps even more profound and exciting here: the value of this work is a strategic benefit that will continue to grow in value exponentially as marketers see the utility of their data scale in time, especially as more advanced applications and manifestations of data use grow.  

Read to learn more? Attend the webinar with Snowflake and OneTrust.