When Cookies Die: Windows vs. Mirrors

There Are Window Companies and There Are Mirror Companies

Which do you work for?

If you’re not sure, Google Chrome’s phase-out of third-party cookies (3PCs) — shortly after Apple did the same across its OS’s and Safari — will soon help you see the light. Or reflection.

As the tech giant announced in March 2021, 3PCs have “…led to an erosion of trust: In fact, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center.”

For brands of every size relying on Google Analytics, it was a stark eviction notice that data-driven companies are slaves to software, and regulations like GDPR and CCPA are strangling tracking technologies as, over the years, many abused these data or left them unprotected. As my mom told us as kids, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Tonight We’re Gonna First-Party Like It’s 1999

As we learned at Amazon (and as Google mentioned above), customer trust is mission critical. Customer Obsession is far and away the most important of the Amazon Leadership Principles, and nothing good can happen for long without it.

But in the void of third-party data, with obsolete segments in your CDP and other core capabilities paralyzed, what’s a brand to do? In a strange twist, we find ourselves looking back to the late-90s, when first-party (customer-implicit) and zero-party (explicit) data were all we had. Trust, content relevance, and contextual targeting were the only avenues to customer loyalty. You couldn’t buy it — you earned it with quality. DoubleClick hadn’t hit its stride yet, and behavioral didn’t exist at scale, so all we could do was deeply understand our customer and give them what they wanted.

Clean Your Windows, Smash the Mirrors

In 2019 category best-seller Brand Currency, I write how Amazon’s attention to the Voice of the Customer was a wake-up call:

At Amazon, everyone is your customer, not just the millions of shoppers, viewers, listeners, and readers visiting its various domains. Your manager is your customer, as are your external clients. The account execs and project managers are customers too. If you find yourself, as a corporate employee, visiting a customer service or fulfillment center, those personnel are your customers for as long as you’re in the building. The entire culture is one of modest servitude. Colleagues’ and clients’ feedback is captured as the Voice of the Customer (VOC), a component of most reporting narratives written every day and performance reviews each semester. VOCs typically provide the final section of these documents ahead of the appendix as a humanistic sign-off before the reader dives into metrics.

Does your company listen this intently to the customer? To be perfectly honest, I’ve never seen another organization come close. After years of VOCs, it appeared to me that there are “mirror companies” and “window companies.” Status quo organizations look into mirrors for where to go next, while the remaining few look out the window at the customer. Mirrors are self-important; windows are humble.

From Nordstrom over a century ago to Patagonia, Subaru, and USAA now, more brands are watching through the window as their looking-glass competitors litter the roadside. Mirrorpox spreads so ubiquitously, so gradually, that unwitting brand owners don’t feel the paralysis until far too late.

Windows and mirrors are just culture metaphors, and cultures come from the top. What’s yours? At Amazon, the Leadership Principles, goals, and programs — to which employees are stringently held with first-party data to be collected, cleaned, and shared — all track to the customer, their satisfaction, privacy, and trust. Every one of them.

That’s why we started KANE, a window company. The only mirrors here are in the bathroom.

Steve is co-founder and partner at KANE, the customer success company built by former Amazon leaders to help brands make the most of e-commerce with data-driven strategy, content development, and performance management.