A Comparative Analysis on Perceptions and Attitudes towards GDPR from a Marketing Perspective

On the 25th of May 2019, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) celebrated its first year since its enforcement. It has been a year since it has started to impact the way companies address their clients and the ways they conceive their marketing strategies and activities. Therefore, this paper intends to investigate how GDPR is perceived by organizations and consumers from a marketing standpoint. This article is part of a broader research commenced last year (2018) bearing in mind the idea of analysing the impact of GDPR on marketing activities, notably on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). In the first phase, we have run an exploratory research in which we interviewed 122 managers in order to understand the perceived influence of GDPR on their own businesses. The second phase consisted of a qualitative research aiming to extract a general feeling regarding the perceptions and attitudes of marketing specialists towards the expected effects of GDPR over their activities. For that purpose, we chose to run a sentiment analysis, using QDA Miner. For this phase, we intend to continue our research series by tackling the idea of comparative analysis in time and space. From the secondary data (statista.com), we have collected, interpreted, and compared information regarding the opinions of marketers from various European countries. Another objective of the present article was to understand how customers', marketers' and organizations' perceptions and attitudes have changed after the first year of GDPR compliance.