Harley Cromer

There we used a student example of nearly 500 students and we showed them different kinds of scenarios where there's this digital personalization.

Ads basically highly...

personalized, and then we controlled for two control conditions.

We used, for example, situations like voice assistants, smartphones, location-based marketing, and then everyone saw a personalized ad.

for the same headphone brand and then we measured the ambiguity, how does it feel ambiguous, the intrusive surveillance, if you feel like stalked, and we measured by self-report if the consumers feel uneasy and maybe even show reactance.

And in this first study we found that both this ambiguity, like is it good or bad, and the stalking, the intrusive surveillance, this predicted the uneasiness

This feeling of uneasiness then predicted the reactance, the negative emotions towards the brand.

Let's put it in rather plain language.

When people felt an ad was hard to explain and a bit like spying, they became uncomfortable and they wanted to resist it.

That was the idea.

That was the first study to have the basic effect, basically see, yes,

This spying feels bad and they feel uncomfortable.

That was first basic study, basically.

I think that was also in another study.

In the second study, we wanted to see if it's the same for all consumers.

There were also differences.

In the third study, we also looked at different products.

In the fourth study, basically, how can companies fix this?

There, we used more than 700 North American consumers

We used an augmented reality billboard scenario and compared interventions by the brands.