Personalization and Privacy: The Assessment and Concerns of Generation Z

Introduction

Personalization is widely used and constitutes a management technique that plays a role in building customer relationships. Personalization could be described as a process that provides an individualized interaction to enhance the customer experience by delivering products and contents according to the customer's preferences. As referred to in literature, personalization is a strategy to gain a competitive advantage, but customers could also benefit from personalization. How? By using digital advertising to communicate with its target consumers, a company can face the challenge of communicating with consumers who are increasingly aware of the value of their data. Some research has identified that some consumers may have a strong opinion about digital advertising. There are studies that suggest that consumers find digital advertising to be annoying and intrusive (Song et al., 2021; Gutierrez et al., 2019), that it can interfere with the browsing experience, and that it can pose a security issue. When browsing the internet or social networks, how many potential consumers come into contact with unsolicited advertising? How many people actually try to avoid online advertisements, even resorting to ad blockers? Personalization aims to focus on the customer's options that meet their preferences and requirements. This could reduce customer disorientation or hesitation and improve the quality of their decision-making.

Technology is rapidly changing the way people communicate, consume information, and relate to the world around them (Dabija et al., 2017; Ersoz & Askeroğlu, 2020). These changes are transforming the world and creating new opportunities and challenges in several areas, including communication. Advances in information technology enable companies to make personalized offers based on consumers and target advertising campaigns (Lee et al., 2011). Based on customer information, programmatic technology can identify key considerations for targeting advertising and optimize strategy performance (Palos-Sanchez et al., 2019). The technological means currently available are changing the way advertisers manage their advertising spaces. By spanning and integrating different technologies across different systems and platforms, technology gives advertisers the ability to know exactly what medium to be in, what is the right ad to show, and the most appropriate time for the right audience. This situation ends up benefiting not only the advertiser but also the customer, who receives a totally relevant experience since he watches and sees what really interests him. As pointed out by Diez (2021), content is understood as meaningful when it provides value to the audience.