How volunteered personal information can help brands

Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) is information that people willingly give organisations about themselves. Alan Mitchell, co-founder of Ctrl-Shift looks at what VPI is and why it’s such an important tool for brands in their direct marketing customer relationship management.

Mitchell explains how, traditionally, organisations have gathered information about their customers, managed it centrally and used it to target top-down messages. With VPI, the individual is in control of what information to hand over, to whom and for what purposes.

This rich, detailed information about people’s lives, lifestyles, preferences as well as their plans and intentions can help brands cut waste in their marketing communications by telling the right people about the right things at the right times.

VPI presents brands with technical challenges and the question of consumer trust, about which Mitchell goes into considerable detail.

Mitchell also suggests what companies can do to ensure they are VPI-ready, from conducting a VPI audit to developing a VPI strategy. Ctrl-Shift estimates that the commercial market for VPI will be worth £20bn by 2020, and organisations that learn the most, the fastest will have the competitive edge.