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One of the most effective tools used by interactive marketers is personalized advertising, which allows consumers to directly respond to customized offers to purchase a brand’s products and services. Yet, recent studies show many consumers are installing ad blockers to avoid personalized ads. This study aims to examine how ad skepticism, ad relevance and ad irritation predict ad avoidance directly, as well as indirectly through consumers’ attitudes toward personalized advertising. Also, considered were how these antecedents’ study in tandem to trigger consumers’ desire to avoid ads by installing ad-blocking software.

An online survey was administered to a pool of 1,313 paid panelists who were familiar with ad blocking and reported that they either currently used an ad blocker, previously used an ad blocker, were considering using an ad blocker or did neither use nor were they considering using an ad blocker. All hypotheses were addressed via path modeling using PROC CALIS in SAS 9.4.

Results indicate that attitudes toward personalized advertising are more complex than attitudes toward advertising in general and mediate the effect of ad relevance on ad avoidance. Likewise, trust in interactive marketers moderates attitude toward personalized advertising and the negative outcomes of ad avoidance and ad blocker usage among skeptical consumers. Also, the reported differences in ad avoidance based on participants’ current vs previous ad blocker usage suggest that former users are using a more sophisticated evaluation of the costs and benefits of using ad blockers.

Consumers’ trust in an interactive marketer to properly collect and use their information plays an important role in moderating negative outcomes associated with personalized advertising. Also, the key is the use of high-quality data (best obtained through a permission-based relationship with the consumer) to deliver relevant ads without stimulating reactance or (privacy-related) boundary turbulence. Findings suggest that bolstering trust by engaging in a transparent, permission-based relationship with consumers may mitigate the tendency to adopt ad blockers and enhance the effectiveness of interactive marketing efforts.

Ad blocking presents a significant threat to the effectiveness of interactive marketing efforts like personalized advertising. Previous research on the antecedents of ad blocking is limited, considers a broad range of factors and offers mixed findings. The present study examines an informed set of cognitive and affective factors suggested by previous ad blocking studies to predict consumers’ desire to avoid personalized ads by installing ad-blocking software. Given the continued threat to the interactive marketing industry posed by ad blocking, a greater understanding of consumers’ motivations to adopt and use ad blockers is critical.

Although very much in vogue in both academic discourse and practitioner rhetoric, presents a case for a need to be concerned over the use of the “R” (relational) word in marketing. But even this needs to be implemented with caution and sensitivity as evidence on how consumers react to the approach shows. In an era of self service and disintermediation, marketers are increasingly turning to customer data instead of the tacit understanding of customers they used to possess when interaction was on a more personal basis. There are, however, concerns over the nature of the data collected and the way in which it is used, that lead to a proposition that relationship marketing can be an oxymoron. Also, however, suggests a number of compromise solutions in an era in which marketers are unlikely to abandon the paradigm. If marketing reverted to earlier paradigms rather than promising cynical consumers a “relationship”, perhaps all parties might actually start to gain more trust in each other. Personal rather than relational interaction would indeed be more pragmatic.

Machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly important in enabling business-to-business (B2B) companies to offer personalized services to business customers. On the other hand, humans play a critical role in dealing with uncertain situations and the relationship-building aspects of a B2B business. Most existing studies advocating human-ML augmentation simply posit the concept without providing a detailed view of augmentation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how human involvement can practically augment ML capabilities to develop a personalized information system (PIS) for business customers.

The authors developed a research framework to create an integrated human-ML PIS for business customers. The PIS was then implemented in the energy sector. Next, the accuracy of the PIS was evaluated using customer feedback. To this end, precision, recall and F1 evaluation metrics were used.

The computed figures of precision, recall and F1 (respectively, 0.73, 0.72 and 0.72) were all above 0.5; thus, the accuracy of the model was confirmed. Finally, the study presents the research model that illustrates how human involvement can augment ML capabilities in different stages of creating the PIS including the business/market understanding, data understanding, data collection and preparation, model creation and deployment and model evaluation phases.

This paper offers novel insight into the less-known phenomenon of human-ML augmentation for marketing purposes. Furthermore, the study contributes to the B2B personalization literature by elaborating on how human experts can augment ML computing power to create a PIS for business customers.

This paper aims to examine the effect of privacy concern, irritation and personalization on Millennials’ perceptions of personalized smartphone advertising avoidance in a restaurant context. The hospitality industry has witnessed a huge surge in mobile activity over the past few years. Mobility opens up a new communication channel and allows industry to connect with their guests in a more personalized way. However, not all customers welcome the personalized advertisements.

Data were collected from 159 Millennials enrolled in a large state university in the Eastern USA using an online self-administered survey. These Millennials were asked to use a restaurant’s smartphone application for 30 days and then complete a survey based on their perceptions of personalized advertising. Descriptive analysis, reliability, factor analysis and regression analysis were used to evaluate the relationships among the four constructs: privacy concern, irritation, personalization and advertising avoidance, with the first three variables as predictors and advertising avoidance as an outcome.

The results suggest that advertising irritation is positively related to advertising avoidance, perceived personalization is related with less advertising avoidance, while privacy concern is not related to advertising avoidance.

Although advertising avoidance has previously been studied for the past few decades, little research has explored the underlying mechanisms of the Millennials’ avoidance of personalized smartphone advertising in a restaurant context. The current research suggests information pertinent to strategies for marketing personalized smartphone advertisement for restaurant companies.

The purpose of this paper is an exploratory study of customers’ “lived” experiences of commercial recommendation services to better understand customer expectations for personalization with recommendation agents. Recommendation agents programmed to “learn” customer preferences and make personalized recommendations of products and services are considered a useful tool for targeting customers individually. Some leading service firms have developed proprietary recommender systems in the hope that personalized recommendations could engage customers, increase satisfaction and sharpen their competitive edge. However, personalized recommendations do not always deliver customer satisfaction. More often, they lead to dissatisfaction, annoyance or irritation.

The critical incident technique is used to analyze customer satisfactory or dissatisfactory incidents collected from online group discussion participants and bloggers to develop a classification scheme.

A classification scheme with 15 categories is developed, each illustrated with satisfactory incidents and dissatisfactory incidents, defined in terms of an underlying customer expectation, typical instances of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and, when possible, conditions under which customers are likely to have such an expectation. Three pairs of themes emerged from the classification scheme. Six tentative research propositions were introduced.

Findings from this exploratory research should be regarded as preliminary. Besides, content validity of the categories and generalizability of the findings should be subject to future research.

Research findings have implications for identifying priorities in developing algorithms and for managing personalization more strategically.

This research explores response to personalization from a customer’s perspective.

This study aims to explore the conversion of metaverse marketing (MVM) into strategic agility among SMEs based on dynamic capabilities (DC) and dynamic management capabilities (DMC) theories. This paper discusses how constructs such as immersive marketing technologies (IMT), customer immersion (CI) and managerial capabilities (MC) play critical role in the transformation of MVM into strategic agility (SA).

A theoretical framework based on DC and DMC theories, and a comprehensive review of the literature on MVM, IMT, CI, MC and SA, was developed in order to theoretically investigate the relationships between MVM and SA. In this theoretical framework, MVM is the independent variable, while the dependent variable is SA. Also, IMT and CI both mediate the association between MVM and SA, while MC moderate the association between MVM and SA in one stream; and CI and SA in another stream.

This research study develops a theoretical framework that recommends nine set of important research propositions in MVM. An extensive literature review was conducted to examine the theoretical framework on the effect of MVM on SA. The proposed theoretical framework suggests that brand community development and communication, experiential marketing and personalisation in MVM, once accessed through IMT (i.e. VR, AR, MR) and CI (i.e. customer engagement, customer absorption-customer acquisition and assimilation of knowledge, presence) can produce significant SA through customer experience management, value co-creation and process innovation.

This current study develops a theoretical framework that theorise the relationship between MVM and SA rooted in literature on MVM and SA, and also based on DC and DMC perspective. The moderating effect of MC on the relationship between IMT and SA on one hand, and CI and SA on the other, provides support to IMT and CI as mediators in the transformation of MVM into SA. This study also provides insight into SME adoption of MVM and how it generates SA. Lastly, the current study contributes to the body of knowledge on MVM, IMT, CI, MC and SA.

The object of this paper is to help to understand what it is all about in question when talking about personalization.

A conceptual framework of personalization is presented, based on the literature.

Marketers are looking increasingly at personalization to help them improve the performance of their efforts. However, personalization seems to be hard to apply. Some of these problems are caused by the fact that personalization means something different to each business and to the different actors in the value chain. This lack of agreement regarding the meaning of personalization limits successful communication between the different actors who produce or buy services and products that are connection with personalized marketing. This hinders co‐operation between service providers and marketers who are willing to apply personalization.

It is hoped that the framework is useful when discussing and developing the idea of personalization further.

This paper aims to explore the experience of adoption of digital marketing and related tools by restaurant entrepreneurs or owners of restaurants in the UK and India.

This study is based on qualitative research. In-depth interviews were conducted with restaurant owners to understand the extent of adoption of digital marketing tools and how they have embraced the digital change in running their business operations.

Findings shed light on major changes in consumer behaviour and the readiness of restaurant owners to adopt digital tools for marketing restaurant businesses. Additionally, this paper also probes restaurant owners’ apprehensions in the process with an objective of retaining customers for a longer period.

It is also evident that there is a clear gap in the restaurant space in India and the UK as far as the adoption of digital marketing tools is concerned. The restaurants in India are yet to adequately harness the digital medium as a strategic tool for marketing. This research can potentially form the basis of further research in terms of using technology and digital tools to reach customers and creating a more personalized experience for them.

This chapter presents a systematic review of over 30 types of online marketing methods. It describes different methods like email marketing, social network marketing, in-game marketing and augmented reality marketing, among other approaches. The researchers discuss that the rationale for using these online marketing strategies is to increase brand awareness, customer-centric marketing and consumer loyalty. They shed light on various personalization methods including recommendation systems and user-generated content in their taxonomy of online marketing terms. Hence, they explain how these online marketing methods are related to each other. The researchers contend that the boundaries between online marketing methods have not been clarified enough within the academic literature. Therefore, this chapter provides a better understanding of different online marketing methods. A review of the literature suggests that the “oldest” online marketing methods including the email and the websites are still very relevant for today’s corporate communication. In conclusion, the researchers put forward their recommendations for future research about contemporary online marketing methods.