The widespread use of personal communication technologies (PCTs) for commercial message dissemination necessitates understanding that PCTs might lead to better commercial performance in different situations. Building primarily on apparatgeist and social construction theories, this research proposes that consumer responses to PCT-disseminated commercial messages are jointly influenced by the PCT (i.e., <i>technology</i>) that carries general symbolic meanings about its nature and purpose (<i>its</i> “<i>spirit</i>”), and the context culture (i.e., the cultural milieu) in which it is used. We began with focus groups' assessments of two commonly utilized PCTs—email and short message service—which revealed their comparative symbolic meanings in terms of intimacy or formality of communication—to be in line with extant literature. Then, in a commercial setting where retailers leverage PCTs to disseminate product discount coupons, we examined the difference between two distinct environments that differed in their <i>context-cultural dimensions</i> (their cultural milieus of social interaction and communication)—i.e., China (an environment of high context-cultural dimension) and Switzerland (an environment of low context-cultural dimension). To do so, we first validated the context-cultural differences through a survey (study 1) and conducted two matching field experiments in the two countries involving more than one thousand consumers (study 2). Results support our propositions, demonstrating favorable commercial performance for SMS use in the high context-cultural environment and for email use in the low context-cultural environment. Follow-up surveys (study 3) corroborated the results and provided deeper insights into how both PCTs' general meanings and pertinent values in the cultural milieus we studied led to consumer responses. Besides presenting empirical evidence to inform the selection of appropriate PCTs for commercial communications, this research contributes to the theoretical development of apparatgeist and social construction theories via its joint examination of technologies and consumers' environments.
Privacy has been an enduring concern associated with commercial information technology (IT) applications, in particular regarding the issue of personalization. IT-enabled personalization, while potentially making the user computing experience more gratifying, often relies heavily on the user's personal information to deliver individualized services, which raises the user's privacy concerns. We term the tension between personalization and privacy, which follows from marketers exploiting consumers' data to offer personalized product information, the personalization-privacy paradox. To better understand this paradox, we build on the theoretical lenses of uses and gratification theory and information boundary theory to conceptualize the extent to which privacy impacts the process and content gratifications derived from personalization, and how an IT solution can be designed to alleviate privacy concerns. 1 Set in the context of personalized advertising applications for smartphones, we propose and prototype an IT solution, referred to as a personalized, privacy-safe application, that retains users' information locally on their smartphones while still providing them with personalized product messages. We validated this solution through a field experiment by benchmarking it against two more conventional applications: a base non-personalized application that broadcasts non-personalized product information to users, and a personalized, non-privacy safe application that transmits user information to a central marketer's server. The results show that (compared to the non-personalized application), while personalized, privacy-safe or not increased application usage (reflecting process gratification), it was only when it was privacy-safe that users saved product messages (reflecting content gratification) more frequently. Follow-up surveys corroborated these nuanced findings and further revealed the users' psychological states, which explained our field experiment results. We found that saving advertisements for content gratification led to a perceived intrusion of information boundary that made users reluctant to do so. Overall our proposed IT solution, which delivers a personalized service but avoids transmitting users' personal information to third parties, reduces users' perceptions that their information boundaries are being intruded upon, thus mitigating the personalization-privacy paradox and increasing both process and content gratification.