When Personalization Backfires

Technological advances have enabled firms to track information about individual consumers and offer personalized recommendations, products, and services to those consumers. Intuitively, individual-level personalization should better serve the unique needs of each consumer (Arora et al. 2008; Franke, Schreier, and Kaiser 2010; Pine 2011), thereby increasing consumer loyalty and firm profitability. I illustrate a problem with technologies that enable personalization: personalized products, services, and experiences (hereafter, “products”) can threaten the self by highlighting aspects of a consumer’s identity that they may not like. Receiving a personalized product heightens consumers’ awareness of their past behavior, which increases the accessibility of the identity related to this behavior. But consumers may not always like or aspire to have the identity that a personalized product activates. Being associated with undesirable identities can pose a threat to the self, and consequently, consumers attempt to avoid products and behaviors that are linked to these negative identities (White and Argo 2009). We, therefore, hypothesize that personalized products will backfire when the personalization activates a feared identity, causing consumers to avoid using the product. Our findings contribute to theory on personalization (Arora et al., 2008) and associated concepts such as mass customization and one-to-one marketing (Franke et al. 2010; Pine 2011) and also work on identity-related consumption (White and Argo 2009; White, Argo, and Sengupta 2012; White and Dahl 2007), showing personalized products can highlight a feared identity, which risks repelling consumers