Global CRM Requires Different Privacy Approaches

Computerworld - American businesses hoping to maximize their investments in customer relationship management systems will have to reckon with an inconvenient fact: People in the U.S. and around the world have different beliefs about privacy. And they'll respond in widely different ways to the intensive data collection and targeted marketing activities inherent in CRM.
What can businesses do about it? Start including the privacy topic in customer surveys and focus groups, and enable customers of all privacy persuasions to self-service their own information stored in the CRM database.
According to over 10 years of research by Columbia University Professor Emeritus Alan Westin, founder of Privacy & American Business, Americans fall into three groups when it comes to privacy. The "privacy unconcerned" -- who comprise 10% of adults -- aren't worried at all about data-intensive marketing efforts and may respond well to it.
The "privacy fundamentalists" now make up about 35% of adults, representing about 70 million people. They're on the opposite side of the spectrum and are turned off by the same highly personalized marketing that the "privacy unconcerned" like.
The remaining 55% of American adults are "privacy pragmatists" who fall between these extremes. They'll provide their personal information to businesses, but only in exchange for very tangible benefits, such as faster service or loyalty points.
Businesses that don't segment their American customers according to where they fall on the privacy spectrum run two risks. An overly personalized marketing effort could "freak out" half their customers, while a campaign that doesn't deliver personally relevant offers will leave money on the table with 40% of their clientele.
And this is just in the U.S. What about the rest of the industrialized world? Do their customers break into these same sets of privacy beliefs?
Westin's surveys in Japan show a very similar three-segment division among Japanese consumers. Westin's research in other national markets isn't as extensive, so it's hard to make an exact comparison. But the laws and cultural histories in those regions reflect distinct differences in privacy beliefs.
Europeans are probably, on average, the most "fundamentalist" in the world in their approach to privacy. Europe is the only region to codify privacy as a human right, and Europe has enacted some of the world's tightest restrictions in the areas of direct marketing and third-party disclosure. Why are they so driven? Europeans will say the extensive privacy invasions of the Nazis and Communists have left their culture with a deep appreciation for the value of their personal information.
Latin America and Canada take the