engleski

Impact of Information and Interactive Communication Technologies on Relationship personalization - has privacy become a commodity?

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to see if information and interactive communication technologies will be able to actually enable true interaction and personalization with consumers. Precondition for automatization, true interaction and relationship personalization is the exchange of information (knowledge) with each other (company and consumer). With this in mind – privacy is for sure an important concept. Although, consumers are generally concerned about their privacy – the question arises: Has privacy become a commodity? Can companies “ buy” consumers’ privacy and get the needed information for relationship personalization? So, this paper analyzes what information are consumers willing to give (and for what compensation) – as a necessary precondition for ICT implementation in marketing. Methodology: For this paper we have used on-line survey on convenient sample of Internet users in Croatia (n=1.083). Respondents were encouraged to fill out the on-line questionnaire through: viral marketing, banner / link on the Croatian search portal, banners / links on web pages of different companies, posts on different Croatian forums. Findings: Two main hypotheses that are researched in this paper are: Consumers are willing to provide information about themselves to companies (H1). Consumers expect a compensation for the personal information they provide to companies (H2). As it turns out, consumers do not have a problem with providing personal information to companies, but expect a certain compensation (analyzed in this paper) for it. Thus both H1 and H2 are accepted. Implications: These findings have implications on the how can companies motivate consumers to provide information (cost-effectively) for interactive marketing communication and the development of personalized relationships. They give insight into what consumers perceive as their adequate benefit for developing the interactive personalized relationships with companies.

Privacy; Personalization; Interactivity; Relationship marketing; ICT; Communications; Technology

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