A WORD ABOUT GDPR…… | 2018

‘Meet GDPR’

GDPR – it sounds like a vitamin supplement! In fact it stands for General Data Protection Regulation, which becomes law on the 25th May 2018. This is Europe wide and it has been established to protect us all from all the nuisance emails and calls that we receive at the moment.

These ask us if we would like to claim for an injury that we never had, buy something that we have no wish to own and are generally a nuisance, filling up our inboxes with nonsense and disturbing us in an important meeting or more importantly, when we are about to sit down to dinner with guests.

The march of communication into every corner of our lives has of course meant that those trying to sell us stuff have a huge opportunity to do just that. There are legions of call centres and the rest whose sole purpose is to cold call, and take advantage of client lists that they have purchased to get to people whose profile would appear to fit their product.

There is probably no one on the planet who would not agree that this practice is deeply irritating and it is high time that it stopped. Hurrah for GDPR. Great idea.

However, it also means that all businesses with client lists must get permission to send them marketing information. Clients are asked to opt in and must positively agree.

Once GDPR has become law, if you receive a marketing email or a call from a business you can ask them for proof that you have positively opted in to be contacted by them.

We work hard to stay in touch with you all. We send our monthly eNews, our annual lifestyle magazine and details about Berthon events through the year. We would like to continue to do this, but of course we also wish to comply fully with GDPR. This means that we will be blogging, emailing and calling you to ask for your consent to make sure that you are happy to continue to receive these details from us.

If you have not opted in by the 25th May 2018 we will quite understand and will delete your details from our mailing list as required by GDPR rules. We hope that you will contact us if we can help you with your yachting plans and adventures in the future.

Of course, Berthon are not the only company that will be looking at and dealing with the consequences of this new legislation up until May 25th. We can confidently predict that you will have a flood, if not deluge of requests from companies with whom you deal or with whom you have dealt with in the past, all wanting to do the right thing and requesting you to opt in to enable them to continue send marketing information.

So, given that this is the case, we recognise that we may not hear from you because we and our colleagues all asking you for your consent comprises a communication influx of Tower of Babel proportions!

This means that we will again, strike you from our mailing list and you will no longer receive marketing material from Berthon from the 25th May 2018.

So, if you stop hearing from Berthon, this will be why. If you would like to receive the annual lifestyle magazine – called the Berthon Book this year and hopefully seriously funky – or our monthly eNews and details of Berthon events, please do let us know.

For those clients with whom we have an existing or on-going relationship either with the Sales Team, or with our sister companies Berthon Boat Company or Berthon Lymington Marina, then we consider you as family. We will continue to communicate with you on these particular matters as we already do – to fulfil our contractual obligations to you. Where our contractual obligations have been fulfilled, we will continue to retain your details on file for 7 years to meet our legal obligations with our friends at HMRC.

So, GDPR – all good, lots of change, and in the first part of 2018 please rely on Berthon to be telling you all about it….. just like this note…

Read Another Article
Download Market Report 2018 (2.1MB)