Wealthy Shoppers Careful About Surrendering Personal Data; Awareness of Dangers Drives Caution

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Mar 11, 2013) - The independent and objective New York-based Luxury Institute surveyed U.S. consumers with minimum household income of $150,000 about their attitudes on privacy and their experiences with companies collecting and handling their personal data.

The majority of wealthy shoppers (68%) are inclined to divulge personal data to merchants online, although 75% report this is due to requirements for completing their transaction. Only 24% indicate sharing their contact information during a recent in-store experience, with women feeling more pressure by brands to provide personal details during purchasing experiences. Email is the type of personal data consumers feel most comfortable sharing both in-store (66%) and online (78%). In addition, 46% of customers say that knowing an individual salesperson makes them more likely to divulge contact details while shopping in-store.

Wealthy customers show a penchant for being left alone: 82% have placed their phone numbers on do-not-call lists, and 63% say they would do the same if there were a similar online registry for blocking the tracking of their Web activities. Half of consumers have already fully disabled or edited tracking on their browsers. 

Almost 60% of wealthy shoppers feel little or no control over their personal data once a company has it, and 30% say that the security of their data is extremely likely to be compromised. 

"Luxury firms must optimize respecting privacy while earning trust in order to collect valuable customer data and use it to create value for customers," says Luxury Institute CEO Milton Pedraza. "Should privacy legislation be enacted, the brands that will be superbly successful will be those that have built genuine, trusted, long-term human relationships with their customers."

About Luxury Institute (www.LuxuryInstitute.com)
The Luxury Institute is the objective and independent global voice of the high net-worth consumer. The Institute conducts extensive and actionable research with wealthy consumers about their behaviors and attitudes on customer experience best practices. In addition, we work closely with top-tier luxury brands to successfully transform their organizational cultures into more profitable customer-centric enterprises. Our Luxury CRM Culture consulting process leverages our fact-based research and enables luxury brands to dramatically Outbehave as well as Outperform their competition. The Luxury Institute also operates LuxuryBoard.com, a membership-based online research portal, and the Luxury CRM Association, a membership organization dedicated to building customer-centric luxury enterprises.