The Effect of Personalization on Consumer

Behaviors

Ziyi Huang1(B) , Guanlin Chen2 , and Guanwen Zhao3

1 School of Management and Economics, Chinese University of Hongkong (Shenzhen),
Shenzhen 518100, China
[email protected]
2 Department of Math, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
3 Shandong Experimental High School, Jinan 250001, China

Abstract. Information is the cornerstone of decision-making process, as con-

sumers’ choice of a product or service mainly based on the information they
receive or collect. The internet has flooded and overwhelmed consumers with
tons of miscellaneous information, causing information overload. Personaliza-
tion is developed as an ideal solution to this problem by delivering messages
to specialized individuals, in order to improve communication efficiency. But it
has become an essential strategic tool for companies and organizations to shape
consumer behaviors. This paper reviews previous studies in this field, providing
comprehensive overview of personalization, consumer behaviors, and the effect
of personalization on consumer behaviors.

Keywords: Information overload · Personalization · Consumer behavior ·

Recommendation · Privacy · Marketing

1 Introduction
There is no denial that we are in the middle of information explosion era. According
to British technical forecast specialist James Martin, in 19th century, the multiplication
cycle of human knowledge is 50 years. By the first half of the 20th century, it became
10 years, and then 5 years in 1970s, 3 years in 1980s [1]. From Data Age 2025, global
data loop is predicted by IDC to grow from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB in 2025, indi-
cating an exponential increase in the last decade [2]. “The technological developments
of the last 50 years have made more information more available to more people than
at any other time in human history” [3]. This phenomenon is majorly due to the wide
application of Internet and development of modern communication and dissemination
technologies. The quality of decisions of an individual correlates positively with the
amount of information he or she receives—up to a certain point. If further information
is provided beyond this optimal point, the performance of the individual will rapidly
decline [4]. The information provided beyond this point will no longer be integrated into
the decision-making process and information overload will be the result [5]. The burden
Z. Huang, G. Chen, and G. Zhao—Contributed equally.

© The Author(s) 2024

S. Tehseen et al. (Eds.): ICEDBC 2023, AEBMR 258, pp. 389–405, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-246-0_47
390 Z. Huang et al.

of a heavy information load will confuse the individual, affect his or her ability to set pri-
orities, and make prior information harder to recall [6]. Therefore, what the individuals
need is a pre-selected information set, that would cut out irrelevant and useless data.
On the other side, for senders, whose goal is to deliver messages to customers and
try to shape their behaviors, have difficulty finding target customers. Furthermore, they
face the strategy change. Whatever information that reaches the customers first have
higher probability to be perceived and accepted. In other words, the accessibility of
an information is the key to customers’ behavior manipulation [7]. Personalization, as
a perfect solution for the problem above, developed rapidly at 20th century. Generally,
personalization is defined as deliver the right things to the right person [8]. By considering
what, how, and why using personalization, the definition is further developed as a process
that tailoring of products and services based upon customers’ personal and preference
information to increase its personal relevance, making it easier to shape customers’
behaviors and decisions, so as to improve customers’ experience or increase vendors’
profits.
Essentially, personalization can be interpreted as a way through which vendors per-
suade consumers to make purchase decisions. In that case, it is vital to learn about
how consumers make decisions and what factors might be influential, that is when the
study of consumer behavior come into use. Consumer behavior is generally defined as
how an individual or group search, select, purchase, use and dispose goods or service.
The beginning of research in this field can trace back to 1920s, and now it is relatively
mature through a decade of development. Multiple models have been established, try-
ing to explain consumer decision process, such as EKB model, Howard-Sheth model
and Nicosia model. Specifically, scholars pay attention to the 5-step decision process
(problem recognition, information searching, alternatives evaluation, choice and deci-
sion, post-purchase evaluation), and the factors that influence the process. In the past
decades, personalization has been widely applicated. Current literature has focused on
the following four main categories: (1) recommendation in searching engines, elec-
tronic commerce and social media platforms (2) personalization for price, also called
price discrimination [9] (3) personalization in bundling sales.
However, after making progress in implementing personalization techniques, it was
people’s concern that, dose it really works? Therefore, researchers keep discovering
the effect of personalization on customers’ behaviors. Most studies show a positive
outcome where it greatly improved customers’ experience and brought mass increase
in venders’ revenue. For example, Boudet et al. found that an increase of 5%–15%
in revenue is directly attributed to successful implementation of personalization, with
an improvement of 10%–30% in marketing efficiency within a single channel [7, 10].
In e-commerce field, many product categories have seen personalization as a positive
factor contributing to consumer purchase decisions. Goldsmith argued that the develop-
ment of marketing thought and practice reaches its peak with personalization, which is
the most recent innovation as opposed to mass marketing, market segmentation, niche
marketing, micromarketing, or mass customization [11]. But there are also researchers
raise the opposite opinions. Some studies argue that although personalization is regarded
as an important element of service delivery, research indicates that limited theoretical
frameworks exist for personalized service delivery during pre-transactional phases [12].
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 391

Researchers also question the positive effect by introducing two difference concepts,
actual and perceived personalization [13].
Another concern regarding the effect of personalization on consumers is the privacy
issue. The whole personalization process is based on data generated by customers them-
selves, and the procedure of data processing is usually untransparent. Consumers who
are unwilling to share their personal information due to privacy or security concerns
will not be able to take advantage of the personalization features provided by retail-
ers, and retailers may be unable to implement personalization. This is also described
as privacy–personalization paradox. For example, potential customers may feel fright-
ened by e-tailers’ requests for sensitive information, such as social ID card number and
credit card numbers, and this may ultimately hinder online transactions. In addition,
consumers’ future intentions to purchase online could be hindered by negative experi-
ences related to privacy and security [14]. Using empirical studies, Milne and Boza have
investigated how privacy concerns affect purchase behavior and decisions. Although
efforts have been made to solve this problem, including implementing regulations or
increasing transparency, the improvement seems insignificant [15, 16].
The literature on personalization kept developing quickly. However, there are con-
flicts or different opinions regarding the effect of personalization on consumer behaviors.
Few studies have offered a summary of this topic. Thus, the current study will provide a
comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of personalization, consolidating the intel-
lectual structure of the field and pointing out the future directions of studies in this area.
First part of the paper introduces the definition of personalization and its applications.
Next, we interpret the concept of consumer behavior, along with its historical studies,
conceptual models and influencing factors. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the effect
of personalization on consumer behaviors.

2 Personalization
2.1 Definition of Personalization
Personalization has already applied to many fields and each of them has different def-
inition of personalization. However, personalization is basically largely driven by the
expected benefits of one-to-one marketing and customer relationship management. Mar-
keters via their strategy which is similar to direct marketing to meet customers’ and avoid
spam reactions. Not only commercial context, politicians are also focusing on using per-
sonalization to improve their campaigns. Modern personalization has many kinds of
meanings which will sometimes confuse marketers. In order to specialize many kinds
of personalization, the paper “What is personalization? A conceptual framework” by
Jari Vesanen separate it into 5 different types of personalization [17]. Segment market-
ing, adaptive personalization, cosmetic personalization, transparent personalization and
collaborative customization. Among these, cosmetic personalization and collaborative
customization have the highest customer interaction, and collaborative customization
has the highest learning opportunity. And all these personalization are used in differ-
ent companies and different occasions. Additionally, the Personalization Consortium
defines it as a using of technology and customer information to tailor electronic com-
merce interactions between a business and each individual customer, however, the first
392 Z. Huang et al.

Fig. 1. Personalization types

personalized marketing letter is just a letter with a specialized name of recipient such
as “Dear Smith” [18]. This can be a result of the evolving internet, so the definition of
personalization will certainly change over time (see Fig. 1).

2.2 Personalization and Customization

In Jari’s classification, there are personalization and customization. For these two differ-
ent types, many different arguments were proposed. Peppers et al. proposed that some-
times it is difficult to separate between concepts since:” a customized site can provide
personalized content”. Customization is part of the personalization [19]. In 2000, Hanson
proposed a similar argument that it is not important to distinguish between these two con-
cepts [20]. However, Roberts offered a totally opposite opinion. His paper supports that
it is important to distinguish between personalization and customization. Customization
is a form of personalization which is done by the customer. Customization is a more
in-depth individualization than personalization [21]. COSMOPlat, an industrial internet
platform built by Haier, is a typical example of a personalized business model that inte-
grates system integrators, independent software providers, technology partners, solution
providers and channel distributors. Users can put forward their demands through smart
devices (e.g. smartphones or tablets). After a certain scale of demand is formed, COS-
MOPlat can realize product development and manufacturing through the nine connected
factories, thus producing personalized products that meet users’ needs.
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 393

2.3 Applications of Personalization

No matter what kinds of personalization occupy the greatest part of the marketing,
they both created many applications. Basically, there are Recommendation, Pricing, and
Bundling.

Recommendation
A recommendation system is a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm
that makes suggestions or recommends more products to customers using big data. These
may be determined using a variety of parameters, such as previous purchases, search
history, demographic data, and other elements. In order to help people find products and
services they might not have found on their own, recommender systems are quite helpful.
Although there are many different recommender systems and methods, the majority of
them fall into three general groups: collaborative filtering, content filtering, and context
filtering. Collaborative filtering algorithms recommend products based on user prefer-
ence data (this is the collaborative aspect); this is the filtering part. With the help of
previous encounters between users and objects and the similarity of user preference
behavior, recommender systems can learn to anticipate future interactions. Contrarily,
content filtering suggests other products that are comparable to the user’s choices based
on the characteristics or features of an item (this is the content part). Based on the
closeness of an item’s and a user’s traits, this method predicts the likelihood of a new
interaction given knowledge of the user and the items they have previously interacted
with. Users’ contextual information is taken into account during the suggestion process
by context filtering. At the NVIDIA GTC, Netflix discussed how to improve sugges-
tions by presenting them as contextual sequence predictions. This method forecasts the
likelihood of the subsequent action using a series of contextual user activities and the
present context [22].

Pricing
Then comes pricing method. Oxenfeldt defines pricing methods as explicit steps or
procedures by which a firm reaches a pricing decision [23]. A pricing method is a method
of calculating and determining the price of a good or service by taking into account all
the factors that may influence the pricing strategy. Factors can include the product or
service, its life cycle, market competition and the target audience. Choosing between
pricing methods is not easy, but it is a mistake that no business can afford to make.
For some companies, making a pricing approach greatly affects the company’s image,
financial position, products and so on. There are four broad approaches to pricing; cost-
plus pricing, competitor-based pricing, value-based pricing and demand-based pricing.
Cost-plus pricing is one of the most widely used methods for determining prices. It
works on the principle that your company makes something and then tries to sell it at
a price higher than the cost of making it. It is simple, quick and widely representative.
Competitor-based pricing methods offer simplicity, accuracy and relatively low risk.
Value-based pricing involves basing the price of a product or service on how much the
target consumer thinks it is worth. Value-based pricing involves basing the price of a
product or service on how much the target consumer thinks it is worth. The demand-based
394 Z. Huang et al.

pricing approach uses current levels of general market demand, rather than customer-
specific research, to determine pricing strategies. It is the most responsive of the four
approaches we have looked at.

Bundling
Bundling is a form of symbiotic marketing strategy in which two or more brands or com-
panies cooperate in the promotion process so as to expand their influence. In general,
bundles are divided into two styles based on the creator: seller-determined bundles are
formed based on constraints in the back o ce by the retailer. In customized bundle, cus-
tomers have access to all products and choose products in the bundle according to their
preferences. There are two main decisions regarding the bundling strategy determined
by the seller: (1) Which products to choose as part of the bundle package and (2) What
should be the price of the bundling the components products in the bundle. The main
issues in analyzing these decisions are the heterogeneity of consumer preference towards
different products, the relevance of component products evaluations, the complementar-
ity property between different products, and the substitutability of products. After the
customer receives the bundler, we can classify the bundle into two types according to
the customer’s right to choose: pure bundling strategy, in which the customer only has
the authority to purchase the entire bundle, and mixed bundling, in which customers can
choose to purchase the entire bundle or individual components separately in the bundle
at their original price. The mixed bundling strategy is certainly more exible but also more
complex forms to make decisions. Xue et al. examined the personalized bundle pricing
strategies of leading information technology (IT) service providers. Ettl et al. consider a
bundle recommendation and pricing model that simultaneously selects the products with
the highest purchase potential for consumers based on their preferences and stock levels
and gives them the most satisfactory bundle price. This literature is highly relevant to our
bundle research. Chen et al.investigates the availability of mixed bundling when there
exists discounted valuation for the component products in the bundle. Using the game-
theory method, Chen et al. reported that valuation discounts play a key role in retailers’
bundling decisions. Guo et al. considered the availability of bundling strategy in the
business format of retailer platforms. This business format is very popular in real indus-
trial practice, such as Amazon, Taobao, Booking.com, and Expedia. Unlike traditional
reselling format, the supplier determines the retail price of individual products.

3 Consumer Behavior
3.1 Definitions of Consumer Behavior
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines consumer behavior as “the acts of indi-
viduals or groups in obtaining, consuming, and disposing of economic goods and ser-
vices, including the decision processes that precede and follow these acts.” [24]. In fact,
there are many scholars gave other definitions. The following Table 1 provides several
examples.
From the table 1 we can conclude that the definitions of consumer behavior for
the past 50 years are similar in essence, but became more and more precise as rele-
vant research developed. Most of the definitions consist of three components: subject,
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 395

Table 1. Definition of Consumer Behaviors

Author(s) Definition of Consumer Behaviors

Enis (1974) [25] A process, which through inputs and their use
though process and actions leads to satisfaction of
needs and wants
Faison and Edmund (1977) [26] The assumption that people have series of needs
which lead to drive state.
Engel, et al. (1986) [27] Those acts of individuals directly involved in
obtaining, using, and disposing of economic
goods and services, including the decision
processes that precede and determine these acts
James F. Engel, Roger D. (1990) [28] Consumer behavior refers to “the mental and
emotional processes and the observable behavior
of consumers during searching for, purchasing
and post consumption of a product or service.
Solomon et al. (1995) [29] Consumer is the study “of the processes involved
when individuals or groups select, purchase, use,
or dispose of products, services, ideas, or
experiences to satisfy needs and desires”
Schiffman and Kanuk (2000) [30] Behavior that consumers express when they
select and purchase the products or services using
their available resources in order to satisfy their
needs and desires.
Schiffman (2007) [31] “The behavior that consumers display in
searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating, and
disposing of products and services that they
expect will satisfy their needs”
Stallworth (2008) [32] A set of activities which involves the purchase
and use of goods and services which resulted
from the customers’ emotional and mental needs
and behavioral responses.
Kumar (2010) [33] Consumer buying behavior “refers to the buying
behavior of final consumers, both individuals and
households, who buy goods and services for
personal consumption”
Kotler and Keller (2011) [34] “Consumer buying behavior is the study of the
ways of buying and disposing of goods, services,
ideas or experiences by the individuals, groups
and organizations in order to satisfy their needs
and wants.”
(continued)
396 Z. Huang et al.

Table 1. (continued)

Author(s) Definition of Consumer Behaviors

Kardes, F., Cronley, M. and Cline, T. “Consumer behavior entails all activities
(2011) [35] associated with the purchase, use and disposal of
goods and services, including the consumer’s
emotional, mental and behavioral responses that
precede or follow these activities.”
American Marketing Association (AMA) Consumer behavior as “The dynamic interaction
[36] of cognition, behavior and environmental events
by which human beings conduct the exchange
aspect of their lives.”
Charles Doyle (Oxford A Dictionary of Consumer behavior is a process through which an
Marketing) (2016) [37] identifiable group of consumers actually make
buying decisions.
Business Dictionary (2019) [38] The term consumer can refer “an end user, and
not necessarily a purchaser, in the distribution
chain of a good or service.”

activities, object, motivations. (1) Subjects refers to consumers, which in most cases
can either be individuals, groups or organizations. Some believed that only people who
make the actual purchase could be considered consumers, whereas others referred to
general end users. (2) Activities consist of searching, selecting, purchasing, using, dis-
posing. Some scholars took information searching and post-consumption evaluation into
consideration. To be more comprehensive, some further included the emotional, mental
and behavioral responses that precede or follow the above activities. (3) Objects refers
to the goods and services, while some researchers had ideas or experiences added. (4)
Motivations usually expressed as “satisfying personal needs and wants”.

3.2 Historical Studies of Consumer Behavior

Study of consumer behavior based largely on motivation research in early years. Motiva-
tion research focus majorly on answering why a buyer chooses to purchase a product or
not. The motivation research started from late 1920s, represented by the work of Paul F.
Lazarsfeld and his colleagues [39]. It “represents the introduction of new concepts taken
from the entire range of social sciences, particularly clinical psychology, sociology, and
anthropology, into consumer or market research” [40]. Motivation research deepened
people’s understanding on consumers, and it gradually developed into a distinct field of
study called consumer behavior during the 1960s. According to Pachauri and Moneesha,
studies of consumer behavior later generated two broad paradigms, the positivist and the
non-positivist. The positivist paradigm, though emerged earlier than the non-positivist
but still in the dominant place, encompassing the economic, behavioral, cognitive, moti-
vational/trait/attitudinal, and situational perspectives. It emphasizes that objective truth
that can be discovered by science. Conversely, the non-positivist paradigms criticize the
former to “overemphasize the rational view and the ideology of a homogenous social
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 397

culture and thereby denies the complex social and cultural world in which consumers
live.” The positivist and non-positivist paradigm have different aims. The former is to
advance the goals of marketing practice while the latter is to gain better understanding
of consumer themselves [41]. Till today, consumer behavior has become an indispens-
able sub-discipline within marketing research. Especially, manufacturers and service
providers should prioritize this since it gives them a competitive edge in establishing
strategies to effectively deliver the correct products and services to the proper audience
of customers using the knowledge of consumer behavior [34].

3.3 Consumer Behavior Models and Decision Process

Scholars have generated multiple models, trying to figure out the process of consumer
decision making. The EKB Model (Engel Kollat Blackwell Model) was a representative
one [42]. It was first proposed by Engel, Kollat and Blackwell in 1968. Fig. 2 shows the
basic structure of EKB model.
EKB model divided the consumer buying behavior into three statuses. Present Sit-
uation, which is the consumer status (physical, psychological, financial, etc.) in current
stage. Desired State, where the consumers want to be in the future. And the pathway for
movement from one state to another, including the following five components: infor-
mation inputs, information processing, decision process, decision variables and external
factors. However, the most contributing part of this model is the elucidation of decision
process, which consists of the following five stages:
Problem Recognition: this is the stage where consumers become aware of their
wants and needs, or in other words, the difference between their present situation and
desired stage. There are multiple ways to evoke a problem recognition process, including

Fig. 2. EKB Model [43]

398 Z. Huang et al.

natural depletion, regular purchase, complementary products, marketer-induced needs,

new products, etc. [44–46].
Information Search: researchers have defined five “sets” of brands during the infor-
mation searching process. They are the “evoke set”, referring to those brands that con-
sumers come up with or recognize from their memories before any information searching
[47]. The “inept set” and “inert set” is a list of brands that consumers have indifferent
feelings or even unfavorable. The “consideration set” is a limited number of selections
that correspond to practical purchase options. And finally, they generate an ultimate
“choice set” that contains several brands with high competitiveness [48–50].
Evaluation of Alternatives: the criteria of evaluation can be divided into two parts,
functional benefits and psycho-social benefits [51]. The former related to tangible con-
sequences of products or services, while the latter concerns emotional or cognitive
influences.
Choice and Purchase Decisions: final decision that a consumer makes depends on
their needs and wants, but it can also be influenced by others like friends, marketers or
the society [52].
Outcome: the consumer may be satisfied or unsatisfied towards the products or
services.
Besides EKB model, there are other models also contribute to this field, for exam-
ple, Howard-Sheth model uses the concept of stimulus-response to explain consumers
decision making behavior over a period of time [53]. Nicosia model looked into the link
between the organization or firm and its consumers [54]. Other researchers also spent
efforts to complete and improve those models. For instance, Khosla and Swati stated that
a purchase intention after alternatives evaluation stage will not necessarily convert into an
actual purchase decision, measured by sales conversion rate. There are also researchers
like Foxall emphasized the importance of post-purchase evaluation, suggesting that it
contains implications for future purchase patterns [55–57].

3.4 Factors Influencing Consumers Decision

Internal factors consist of following two categories: (1) Psychological factors like moti-
vation, attitude, value, belief, perception and emotion. For instance, there are several
theories related to motivation. The Maslow’s hierarchy ranks human needs into physio-
logical needs (foods and water), safety needs (security), belongingness and love needs
(friends and intimate relationship), esteem needs (other’s respect and self-respect), self-
actualization needs (achieving one’s full potential) [58]. Fiske proposes five social
motives: belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self and trusting others [59].
There are also studies concerning perception, which focus on the way individuals orga-
nize and interpret stimuli into meaningful understanding. (2) Demographic factors like
age, income, lifestyles, gender, occupation and educational level. It also involves prior
experience, as studies show that when consumers have prior experience, they are less
motivated and exert less effort to look for information, but they are more efficient when
processing new information. [52, 60, 61]. External factors include culture, subculture
(religions, racial groups), social class, reference group (groups that have direct or indirect
influence on consumers, such as families and friends) and so on. For instance, Hofstede
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 399

depicted culture into six dimensions, including power distance, uncertainty avoidance,
individualism, masculinity, time orientation and indulgence [62].

3.5 Internet Consumer Behavior

According to Shun and Yunjie, online consumer behavior is different to offline behavior.
They also argue that there are two types of consumer value in purchasing: product value
and shopping value. The former does not differ between online and offline, since the
products received are the same despite the different distribution channels. However, the
shopping experience differ wildly. During online shopping, customers gain satisfaction
from website navigation and the ease of selecting optimal choice, while during offline
shopping, customers enjoy the environment of physical store, services from staffs and
the ability to try the product in person [63]. Lewis divides online consumers into five
categories: (1) Directed information-seekers, who searches for information about a spe-
cific product or service, but will not necessarily make actual purchases. (2) Undirected
information seekers, who searches for information without an intention for purchasing
goods. (3) Directed buyers, who go to the internet in order to buy a specific good or
service. (4) Bargain hunters, who are sensitive to price and usually attracted by sale
promotions or discounts. (5) Entertainment seekers, who are attracted by interactive
online marketing activities [64]. Moreover, in contrast to physical purchasing, Wendy
Moe asserted that it is challenging to anticipate actual buying, browsing, and searching
behavior when consumers are shopping online. However, it can be resolved by looking
at click patterns and frequency of visitation [65].

3.6 Other Research Focuses

Research efforts have been made in various detailed segment of consumer behavior. (1)
Researchers looked into how the risk is perceived during buying process, including per-
formance risk (whether the product or service will function well), financial risk (potential
waste of money if the product or service did not perform well), safety risk (possible harm
brought by unproper functions), socio-psychological risk (others negative evaluation on
the product or service) [66]. They also studied how consumers perceive these risks
and manage to reduce them. (2) Impulse buying, referring to immediate purchase deci-
sions without sufficient thinking or initial purchasing intention. It includes pure impulse
buying, reminded impulse buying and planned impulse buying. It can be triggered by
all kinds of marketing skills such as in-store commercials, products placed near the
checkout counter, persuasion of salesmen and other sensory marketing. (3) Consumer
decision styles, including quality-conscious, brand-conscious, price-conscious, hedo-
nistic, novelty-conscious, habitual and so on. (4) Customer loyalty, dividing customers
into four types: no loyalty, spurious loyalty, latent loyalty and loyalty. Researches also
study how companies can cultivate and maintain customer loyalty. (5) Adoption of new
products, brand-switching and channel-switching [67–69].
400 Z. Huang et al.

4 Conclusion
From the literature review conducted, it is clear that the domain of personalization is
complicated and versatile. Although a fundamental appreciation of personalization is
present, the notion is not as refined or reinforced as other concepts in marketing. Per-
sonalization can influence the decision to purchase. Where online visitors interact in a
positive way with a given type of brand or website via an advertising format, it is highly
probable that a purchase decision will be made. Nevertheless, people are concerned about
permissible advertising formats, like getting information from a dialogue. Personaliza-
tion is closely related to the concept of engagement and means tailoring parts or entire
components within the marketing portfolio to the personal dimension. Personalization
is more elaborate over customization because customization is performed on behalf of
the customer on an automated basis by the member of the marketing staff, rather than a
request for customization by the customer himself. An example of customization would
be if a product was ordered by a customer from Dell with specific choices for a micro-
computer, versus an example of pre-installing a Dell software package that it anticipates
the user will prefer to purchase. This kind of differentiation is significant since it places
the responsibility of identifying the proper level of customization on the marketer. As
a result, it is important for marketers to be able to project exactly by what clients will
desire. Typically, at the customer level, this is done by using analytical instruments to
leverage information at the customer interface. Accordingly, personalization is tightly
integrated with technology and applications.
Even though a number of Internet subscribers disagree with tailored targeting and are
less likely to get involved, they still enjoy being shown ads that are personalized rather
than objective. This means that they still prefer to view personalized instead of average
ads. In the e-tailing environment, privacy and security issues are of significant interest
to consumers. The personalization available in e-tailing involves consumers voluntarily
or unwillingly supplying individual “up-front messages” for the container to enforce.
When consumers resume disclosing personal information for privacy or security fears,
they are unable to use the personalization capabilities that retailers offer, and it may not be
possible for retailers to implement personalization. Consequently, personalization does
not necessarily increase consumer purchase intent in an e-commerce environment in a
positive way. That is why most e-tailers maintain privacy statements on their websites and
publish security statements, and these documents include descriptions of the information
about how they collect it, for what it will be used, and why the information is needed by
them to alleviate the concerns of consumers regarding both privacy and security during
transactions.
There are a number of challenges presented by personalization, including problems
associated with getting access to information back from consumers. Protection of privacy
basically refers to the issue of anonymity and access to hold control of an individual’s
personal details. Sometimes consumers’ own private data are gathered upon their own
admission, but subsequently disclosed to third parties in the absence of their agreement
[70]. Privacy and security are critical for e-retailers seeking more customized services as
requests from e-retailers asking for similarly responsive information as social security
numbers, credit card numbers, residential addresses, police numbers, healthcare details
and financial institution account numbers may scare prospective customers and impede
 The Effect of Personalization on Consumer Behaviors 401

productive trading within online stores. In addition, adverse security and privacy-related
experiences may reduce consumers’ willingness to shop online in the future [15]. The
other key aspect of information privacy concerns is the ramifications of a consumer’s wor-
ries, as understanding the dimension of behavioral responses stemming from concerns
about privacy can be equally important as understanding the antecedents and outcomes
of such worries. Milne and Boza investigated emotionally the underlying effects of pri-
vacy concerns and correlates on buying practices and the process of making purchase
decisions [16]. Salisbury et al. discovered the following from experiential tests that the
beliefs of usefulness, convenience of negotiation, and safety were prominent in online
shopping, and that perceived improvements in the level of online security would lead to
greater intention to purchase products online [71].
Despite the numerous measures of security in place to protect users across the Inter-
net, hackers and unscrupulous websites are still pilfering our individual details, resulting
in a rather passive approach to digital memory. To continue to protect online user infor-
mation, privacy laws need to keep pace with evolving technology as the Internet and
computers evolve, adapt and change. Legislation varies depending on the region in which
you reside when cookies are involved. In Europe, with the General Data Protection Reg-
ulation (GDPR), for example, users online will have to specifically “opt-in” to having
their information distributed by cookies. In America, contrarily, a person must clearly
“opt-out” from receiving these types of datasharing technologies. Numerous corpora-
tions frequently mislead users into sharing their information by masking their cookie
sharings notifications with requests to engage in research for the company. It is extremely
vital that security on the Internet is maintained. With the tremendous growth in technol-
ogy in the past 15 years or so, millennials with access to the Internet can unknowingly
and unintentionally compromise their safety online by revealing their information if they
are not given the appropriate education. Personalization enables the ability to visit things
like clicks, testimonials and comments that will eventually help build user bios and per-
mit recipients like Amazon to deliver users individualized offerings across a variety of
sectors, covering such things as food and drink, film, technology and the press. This
brings us to another of Garner’s 2019 articles regarding the ways in which the concept
of private can soften the barriers to a stellar guest encounter. An extremely pertinent
quote reads, “Organizations that integrate their identity and behavioral data will surpass
organizations that fail to do so.” The Web can be an exceedingly crowded field, and
personalization is key to staying abreast [72].

Acknowledgement. Ziyi Huang, Guanlin Chen, Guanwen Zhao and Yujie Xia contributed
equally to this work and should be considered co-first authors.

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