When Less is More - How Making Products More Personal Can Decrease Purchase Intention

Personalization (i.e., tailoring products and services to individual consumer needs) is central to many successful businesses (Kavadias, Ladas, and Loch 2016). Research on personalization has predominantly investigated the effects of consumers sharing personal information with companies (e.g., Zhang and Wedel 2009). Yet in various industries, companies are also sharing personal information with consumers (i.e., the flow of information is reversed): The furniture retailer IKEA provides names of product designers aside its products in its retail and online stores. The food manufacturer Ruegenwalder Muehle displays pictures and job descriptions of product developers on its products’ packages. The FMCG company Beiersdorf shares videographic stories of product developers online. These examples illustrate a novel approach to personalization (hereafter referred to as “personization” (Fuchs et al. 2016)), which is different from traditional personalization in several aspects: Foremost, companies share personal information with consumers. Thus, the direction of information flow is reversed. Furthermore, personization might make products appear to be more personal, yet they do not become more individual. Finally, consumers cannot opt out of personization as there is no proactive consent necessary. Thus, the author believes that the existent research on personalization is only partially applicable to this matter. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is only one study specifically dedicated to this topic (Fuchs et al. 2016), which demonstrates that consumers choose personized over non-personized products in a series of choice based experiments. Considering that personization used in practice yet under-researched, the author examines positive and negative effects of personization on consumer behavior in two studies.