First-party Data: How Are Marketers Creating 'The Hook'?

With the inevitable death of third-party cookies to protect user privacy and adhere to regulations, the need for marketers to rely on first-party data has become more crucial than ever. This puts greater pressure on brands to manoeuvre to more innovative routes to capture customer information, deliver personalised content and track user behaviour accurately.

First-party data, as we know it today, is helping brands drive a broader set of audiences and scale them to new heights. While it can be used as an identifier for activation across platforms, it also presents a wealth of chances to deepen consumer connections through owned media and eventually engage in meaningful conversations. 

First-party Data: A Crown Jewel For Brands

For brands, there hasn't been a better time to focus on gathering first-party data. It has emerged as the crown jewel for most businesses, the most valuable information that brands can control. It is the same data that comprises all the interactions, actions, and feedback they acquire directly from their customers through the various channels where the brand is actively present.

Ruchira Jaitly, CMO, Diageo India, explains how the category she operates in is highly regulated, which in turn makes understanding consumers more important. "Globally, we are experimenting and trying different experiences, especially after Covid. For us, first-party data is consent-driven, has a time stamp and is truly compliant. While it is immensely crucial for us, it is also difficult to get. There is a constant value exchange that happens," she mentions. 

For a brand like Colgate-Palmolive, on the other hand, the challenge is to create more personalised experiences, encouraging audiences to try their premium products. The brand's director - integrated brand experience lead, media and digital marketing, Priyanka Gandhi, shares, "We aim to pull our audiences to our premium range, say the kids segment or the whitening segment. We build value exchanges here through influencer classes, disseminate knowledge around how to groom themselves, etc., and in return, get data from them. Additionally, to drive sales on digital platforms, we offer them a better experience in return." 

Interestingly, according to BCG's 'Global Digital Marketing Maturity Survey', businesses that integrate their first-party data sources can increase cost efficiency by 1.5 times and produce twice as much revenue from a single outreach, communication, or advertisement.

On using data and creating a valuable experience for consumers, Gazal Bajaj, head of integrated media and digital at Nestle India, emphasises that the brand focuses on the sales potential it holds. "Incrementally, we collect and activate within a 48-hour window. We bring measurability to the people we know and do not know. It is a journey and there is no right or wrong way to do it," she says.

Navigating The Challeneges

Even though first-party data is valuable and increasingly important to gather and use, many businesses find it difficult to realise its full potential.

It is particularly challenging because of organisational and technological concerns, according to a study conducted by Google in the Asia-Pacific region. The first cause is an incapacity to connect technologies (which may result from numerous teams continuing to operate in isolated silos) and the second is a deficiency in knowledge about data.

Supporting this, Valueleaf's group president - revenue, Narin Shetty, asserts, "Data is the goldmine. But with brands and their data, it becomes difficult to do what needs to be done. The real question that arises is how to utilise this data. For this, we suggest creating segmentation, designing personalised messages and content for various channels and then creating lookalike audiences for that data."

In the years to come, integration will become an essential part of the plan since brands will need to gather information that gives them a picture of each of their consumers and enables them to target them with customised content. Also, investigating zero-party data as a means of obtaining priceless marketing information that consumers voluntarily provide will become as important.

For marketers looking to enhance the consumer experience and eyeing greater business results, first-party data may provide an explanation for that.