Consumer attitudes toward and acceptance of personalization attempts in the online environment

Abstract

By the extended use of Internet; technology and dynamic interaction for the first time makes personalization cost effective at large-scale. It also offers the possibility to provide personalized products and services at competitive prices. This development forces marketers to focus more in online personalization attempts to help them to improve the performance of their efforts. The objective of this study is to determine the basics of consumer attitudes toward and acceptance of personalization attempts by compiling relevant scales from the marketing literature, developing two new scales for understanding the advantages and disadvantages of personalization and identifying relevant attitudes toward different personalization types in the online environment. Data collected online from 250 people was analyzed by using descriptive, reliability, ANOVA, cluster, factor and linear regression analyses to test the hypothesis and provide the findings. In today’s very challenging marketing environment, it is very critical to identify different segments among consumers and apply right strategy to each different group based on consumers’ attitudes to different type of personalization. Many findings in this study can provide important strategic tools for marketers who want to provide online personalized offerings to the right consumer group to provide customer attention, loyalty and safe positioning against commoditization.