Personalized marketing - A qualitative study on tailored marketing online from a consumer's perspective

Abstract: When consumers today navigate and shop online they meet different types of advertisements, both directly on the e-commerce website and through other channels. Many companies use personalized marketing as a way to create relationships with consumers. However, personalization today is a sensitive area and often twinned with privacy issues. Many consumers feel as they are being stalked. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how consumers perceive personalized marketing in purchasing situations online when it is used as a customer relationship management-tool. The result should be of great use for practitioners that deal with retailing online in order to maximize the effect of their marketing efforts. Through qualitative interviews we intend to investigate consumers’ sensitivity concerning e-retailers data gathering on the Internet. Our main findings concern the degree of personalization in marketing messages, when personalization strengthens the consumer-company relationship and when it is seen as an intrusion on privacy.