NAID Briefing--It's Time for a Second Wind

Whether you are talking about the last five miles of a marathon or the last 10 pounds to hit your target weight, the closer one gets to a goal, the tougher things tend to get. The marketing of secure information destruction services is no different.

One of the many interesting findings of NAID’s recent consumer attitudes survey is that the growth rate of the secure destruction market has declined sharply from its high just two years ago. Don’t get me wrong, the use of secure shredding services is at an all-time high and it continues to grow; it is simply growing at about a quarter of the rate it was growing at between two and four years ago.

Throughout the last eight years, organizations have felt an unprecedented amount of pressure to protect discarded information. The height of this pressure was between 2002 and 2004. We had the HIPAA and GLB compliance deadlines, the Enron-Anderson scandal, the identity theft epidemic and massive data breaches appearing in the headlines on a weekly basis.

As a result of all this attention within a short time, most organizations took notice and reacted. A little more than one-third of them chose to use a shredding service; a little less than two-thirds bought shredders. The effectiveness of their solutions is irrelevant. The point is that the market reacted, and companies have now taken whatever action they felt they needed in response to the regulatory and public relations risks. The market reached a new equilibrium, and so the growth rate has slowed.

Lest anyone get discouraged about the slowing growth rate for shredding services, I hasten to add that two-thirds of the marketplace has yet to learn the value of outsourcing their destruction needs. We can take comfort in the fact that they are already somewhat sensitive to the need for information protection. As they grow to fully appreciate what is required to effectively meet that responsibility (with continued prodding by stronger regulations and encouragement from NAID), most of them will see the light.

We are just finishing off the first third of our journey, much of it downhill. It is simply time for us to catch our second wind and keep moving forward.