Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration. Bachelor of Science with Specialization in Marketing – Main Field of Study: Business Administration. School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University, Course Code 2FE21E, 2017.  Title: Likelihood of Using Online Personalization Services: An Explanatory Study Authors: Avesta Diliwi, Christopher Ullberg and Johanna Jevinger Supervisor: Michaela Sandell Examiner: Åsa Devine Background: Online personalization is the result of the rapid technological and digital development where consumers are provided products, services and content based on their individual preferences. Various research has been conducted regarding what factors influence the utilization and acceptance of personalization but does not provide a holistic view on the unified relationship of the recurrent variables of value for personalization, concern for privacy and trust building factors towards likelihood of using online personalization services. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explain the relationship of value for personalization, concern for privacy, and trust building factors with the likelihood of using online personalization services. Methodology: This research replicated Chellappa and Sin’s (2005) research by modifying their theoretical model and testing it in another context. An explanatory, deductive, quantitative research approach and cross-sectional research design were utilized within this research, where self-completed questionnaires were distributed online with a number of 228 valid responses collected. Findings: The findings demonstrate that the new theoretical model is significant and that it explains the likelihood of using online personalization services with 62,3%. Value for personalization and concern for privacy are considered highly significant and are thus accepted hypotheses, while trust building factors is not considered significant and therefore rejected. Conclusion: This research provides an insight into consumers’ usage decision in regards to likelihood of using personalization. It also provides a furthering on prior research in regards to a theoretical development, the modified model tested in a new context, but also in the findings in how the three independent variables affect the dependent variable. In addition, this research provides support for practitioners of online personalization services to understand which factors actually affect consumers’ usage decision, and can potentially develop strategies accordingly. Keywords: Personalization; Online Personalization Services; Likelihood of Using Online Personalization Services; Value for Personalization; Concern for Privacy; Trust Building Factors

Data collection and online personalization has become essential part of modern marketing, and thus, embedded into consumer’s everyday life. This has emerged a lot of negative attention in the media and privacy concerns among consumers – however, their attitudes towards privacy seems to be controversial with lack of privacy enhancing behavior. The purpose of this study was to find out what is consumers take on online personalization, data collection and GDPR. In order to the tackle the causing reasons of such perceptions, focus group discussions were performed. The emerging thoughts were analyzed with the concepts of privacy paradox and information asymmetry – how structural imbalance between the advertisement network, companies and consumers impacted to their thinking about personalization and which factors caused the unwillingness to enhance one’s privacy, despite the attitudes that would predict different behavior. The results showed, that many respondents do not mind personalization if they perceive it relevant. However, the intrusive nature of its practices made the participants, directly or indirectly, reluctant towards it, as it was highlighted that it is not personalization per se that made the respondents uncomfortable, but how it was done. Due to the advertisement networks’ opaque nature, the participants founded challenging to comprehend how personalization was performed. Thus, conspiracy theories about surveillance, such as tapping via smartphone, were broad up to explain companies’ ability to know and target them so well. The main channel for companies to inform consumers about their privacy policy is terms and conditions. However, due to several reasons, the decision making for one’s privacy face many hinders, that may influence in how consumers perceive their privacy and how their personal data is collected and used. A controversiality between GDPR’s, companies’ and consumers’ view on privacy self-management is evident, as the regulation and companies rely too much on consumer’s own responsibility.

Nowadays when users navigate in internet they find lots of types of communication scattered across diverse sites. Due to the lack of users’ interests in advertisements, primarily caused by not matching their preferences, today’s advertisements have a low rate of success. Recently, owing to semantic web generation, some companies started to use personalized marketing in communication as a way to turn the conversions around and thus increase customer retention and loyalty. As a matter of fact, the retention and loyalty stages on the internet are, on average, the least crafted of the whole cycle. The customers’ conception of one-to-one marketing is quite ambiguous as they conceive that they need to be more efficient while shopping online but at the same time they feel stalked due to privacy concerns, and oversaturated with non-valuable information. The purpose of this paper is to explore from a holistic view online personalized communication strategies and how they can be implemented in order to increase customer satisfaction thus retaining customers and, in the long-term, gaining their loyalty. The main communication areas the study treats ranges from onsite the online store, where the company wants to sell the product, to offsite advertisements in websites, social media platforms and via email. In the empirical section, the study carried out a quantitative online survey to investigate customers’ perception and complete it with the literature. To answer the research questions, the study identified 19 hypotheses comprising of all primary aspects that define the exploration. The result could be gold dust for e-shop managers to help them maximize the marketing communication factor using personalization. The authors identified potential improvements to motivate customers to register in the online shop, whether communication channels are suited to implementing the strategy or not, and possible aspects to adapt in order to obtain maximal benefits. There were some limitations in terms of an analysis of the companies’ point of view and the necessity to analyze every communication channel more in depth as the study is an initial step.