Relationship Marketing: Exploring Relational Strategies in Marketing
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Reviews A Guide to the Data Protection Act 1998 for Direct Marketers Colin Fricker Direct Marketing Association (UK), 2001; softback; 71pp; £75 to DMA members, £150 to non-members
Lucid and comprehensive
Thirty years of history
Lessons learned?
The need for proactivity
Colin Fricker has recently retired as director of government and legal affairs for the UK DMA. The comprehensive lucidity of this booklet demonstrates how much he will be missed. There is a generous recognition of help received from other parties (including the Data Protection Commissioner, whose imprimatur is invaluable) but the ®nal product is worthy of the author's long and distinguished career. The booklet manages to square one particular circle rather well: while it speci®cally draws attention to the changes which the 1998 Act makes to the 1984 Act (with which most current readers may be supposed to be familiar), it is also so constructed that newcomers to the industry, of whom there will be very many in succeeding years, should have no dif®culty in following it. This is a publication that every direct marketer should ®rst read from cover to cover, and then keep on an accessible shelf as a prime source of reference. The introduction gives us a brief reminder of the long history of data protection in the UK, from the report of the Younger Committee on Privacy in 1972 through the 1984 Act, to this Act of 1998 based on the EU Directive on Data Protection of 1995. Over nearly 30 years of debate on this issue, the industry has had to ®ght a series of lengthy and costly battles against ignorance, misunderstanding and occasional malice in order to secure a position no more onerous than could, and should, have been provided for by a sensible code of practice in the ®rst place. (The reviewer makes no mention of the cost to the public purse, both past and continuing.) And in these battles Colin Fricker, as director of legal and regulatory affairs for the DMA, played a vital part. From these battles the industry has, one must fervently hope, learned some lessons for the future. (And perhaps the EU Commission has as well.) Certainly it is an industry much stronger and better equipped, both in the UK and in Europe, than it was 30 years ago. Both the DMA in the UK and FEDMA in Europe owe their existence (long overdue when it came about) to the need to form a coherent front against the destructive tendencies of the directive's ®rst draft, coupled with the Data Protection Commission's failure to consult with business and industry. But the DMA and FEDMA were formed, necessarily in the circumstances of the time, as reactive bodies struggling to hold a defensive line. What is required now is a proactive attitude to issues of industry regulation. There is evidence that, in the burgeoning ®eld of ebusiness, the industry is indeed making serious efforts to take the lead, and to demonstrate the inherent superiority of self-regulation over
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