The role and impact of personalization technology on customer acceptance of advertising via short message service (SMS)

Abstract

There exists the common belief that the more personalized the message, the greater the relevance to the customer, including enhancing the trust between customer and firm and thereby leading to a stronger customer relationship. Yet little is known about the effectiveness and impact on customer acceptance specifically in advertising of Short Message Service (SMS), by combining the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and information processing theory, this study investigated how context-driven and self-referent personalization technology works, their interactions and the need for cognition on elaboration and attitudes toward advertising. A field experiment was conducted incorporated with a credit card service firm using phone interview with verbalization thought-listing technique. The results from 420 participants show that context-driven personalization technology exhibits a strong influence on persuasion process, while there is no significant of self-reference effect and interaction of need for cognition. The result of this research will help practitioners to gain more insight into how the customer perceives personalized advertising, while, academically, this will lead to further study of other personalization technologies