Personalization paradox: the wish to be remembered and the right to be forgotten : A qualitative study of how companies balance being personal while protecting consumers’ right to privacy

Many argue that personalization is needed in a modern marketing strategy. Whilst there are several positive aspects of personalization, e.g. improved customer satisfaction rates, it can also lead to firms being perceived as intrusive and elicit privacy concerns. This dilemma describes the personalization paradox, which refers to the two-sided results of using personalized communication by collecting and analyzing consumer data. To address the issue of how firms balance the need for personalization while still respecting consumers’ privacy, previous researchers have mainly investigated the issue from the consumer perspective. However, the consumer is believed to display a paradoxical behavior in regards to personalization. Therefore, we have addressed this issue through interviewing 12 company representatives from 7 companies. Our findings indicate that companies are mindful when creating personalized content and do acknowledge the issues with privacy and the risk of being perceived as intrusive. To overcome the personalization paradox, firms are not explicit about their data analysis in their personalized communication as this can lead to consumers feeling discomfort. Finally, an essential way that firms can prevent privacy concerns is to create relevant content as this outweighs feelings of discomfort. These findings to a certain extent do not reflect the empirical research on the topic, however the discrepancies may exist as previous studies were conducted from the consumer side