EXPRESS: Personalization in Marketing Communication: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Personalization in marketing communication may increase relevance, and thus lead to successful persuasion, but at the same time may trigger privacy concerns, thus leading to persuasion failure. These contradictory effects are described by the personalization paradox. Prior research has provided diverse results on personalization effects and what they depend on. It lacks a generalizable empirical pattern describing the paradox, leaving researchers with ambiguous theoretical implications and practitioners with little guidance on whether and when personalization is a useful marketing communication tool. To address these gaps, this meta-analysis integrates 1,536 effect sizes of personalization effects in marketing communication extracted from 290 studies found in 229 papers. The results reveal, first, that personalization leads to persuasion success and has negligible negative effects. Second, personalization effects depend on various moderators including the data type used: personalization is more persuasive when these data are closely tied to the consumer’s self-concept. Third, the level of personalization leads to a J-shaped pattern of persuasion, describing a modified model of the personalization paradox, with the most persuasive effects at the end of the personalization spectrum. These findings provide novel empirical generalizations of personalization effects and recommend marketers to use personalization and when personalized marketing communication is most effective.