Ads are watching me

With the advancement of technological platforms, the use of recommendation agents that can provide highly customisable solutions has become more ubiquitous. Marketing academics and practitioners alike have begun to investigate various communication styles and functionality designs of such decision aid systems. One variant of a design of a recommendation agent is to imbue it with humanlike features (i.e. to anthropomorphise it). However, academic research is silent with respect to whether this type of design would lead to more favourable consumer evaluations. To fill this gap, our research investigates the downstream consequences of anthropomorphising a recommendation agent, when the recommendation itself may require the exchange of personally sensitive information, and the message is customised. The results of two experiments reveal that, when a message is customised, the effect of an anthropomorphized recommendation agent on attitude towards the advertisement is predominantly negative and is mediated by consumers’ unwillingness to provide personal information to an anthropomorphic recommendation agent, as well as by greater psychological resistance towards the advertisement. Our research concludes with theoretical and practical implications, as well as further research directions.

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