Trust has always influenced commercial relationships, but the digital economy has transformed it into something more immediate and fragile. Every request for personal information, automated recommendation and AI-assisted conversation now asks customers to make a judgement: does this organisation deserve access to my data?
Their answer increasingly affects where they spend. Cisco’s 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey found that 75% of consumers would not purchase from an organisation they did not trust with their data. Among people aged 25–34, 49% had switched companies or providers because of data policies or sharing practices.
This is turning privacy from a regulatory concern into a customer experience discipline. A technically compliant privacy notice is no longer enough if customers cannot understand it, control their preferences or see the value they receive in return for sharing information.
“Trust is no longer a ‘soft’ metric – it is a revenue lever,” says Martin Hartley, Chief Commercial Officer at emagine. He argues that companies must stop treating privacy as “a legal checkbox owned by risk teams” and begin treating it as a product and customer experience decision shared by legal, product and customer-facing teams.
