The role of consumers’ knowledge and attitudes in determining the importance of privacy in big data marketing

• Main Author: Nybacka, A. (Aino)
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Oulu 2018
• Subjects: Marketing
• Online Access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201806062496; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:fi:oulu-201806062496

The world has changed due to the digital revolution and this means that the marketing environment has changed and that it has to keep changing. Even though the data has always existed and been a part of marketing, due to this digital revolution the marketing done based on customer data has evolved immensely as well. Big data offers marketers opportunities that seem endless, due to the exponentially growing amount of data and the new innovations that are made to harness it, but what has to be remembered is that big data marketing is not a solution without its problems. In this research we focus on big data marketing and its implications on consumer privacy; what are the knowledge and attitudes of consumers towards privacy in big data marketing and what is their role in determining the importance of consumer privacy for the companies. The question we ask and answer is: how consumers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards privacy in big data marketing affect the reasons why companies should take privacy as a part of their strategy? The aim of the research is to explain why consumers’ knowledge and attitudes towards privacy in big data marketing are important and thus something that the companies should take into account in their strategy when looking at it from this particular point of view. These questions are examined through asking a group of informants about their knowledge and attitudes towards privacy in big data marketing and analyzing the data in its entirety before drawing conclusions from it. The research is conducted with a qualitative questionnaire sent to this group of informants and the findings are a direct result of these answers collected from them. The findings of the research include both theoretical contributions and managerial implications. Theoretical contributions of this work presents a model that introduces a framework that explains how the knowledge and attitudes of consumers are interwoven with companies’ actions and what are the major aspects in each of the parts that have an effect on how the privacy in big data marketing is seen and this plays directly to the reasons why companies should take privacy as a part of their strategy. In the managerial implications we explain these things further and learn how either positive or negative outlook towards big data marketing from the consumers’ point of view can affect them in a larger scale and not just on how the customers’ see them. These results can be used to evaluate how the consumers see privacy in big data marketing in a specific company and what are the things that can be done to help the situation; what the companies can do to help consumers’ see privacy in big data marketing in a better light and help them understand the possible ramifications from negative outlook and benefits from a positive one.