Awareness and Perceived Usefulness of Online Personalization Activities

Businesses are utilizing personalization activities to individually communicate with their customers depending on their needs and preferences. A study with University students has been conducted to survey, if this user group is aware of personalization activities and if they perceive any usefulness of the individualized communication. It has been found, that the awareness of personalization activities is very high on the online retail platform Amazon, but decreases for the search engine Google and is around a half for the social media platform Facebook. The perceived usefulness of personalization activities depends on the initial buying intention of the user. Personalization activities which aid or expand an existing buying intention of customers are perceived as more useful than personalization activities, which aim on the generation of additional buying intentions.