Consumer Trust and Platformised Retail Personalisation

As retail is becoming increasingly digitised in its operation and consumer relationships, much faith is being put into automation, prediction, and insights drawn from consumer data to shape consumer experiences and expectations. Under the umbrella of data collection and artificial intelligence (AI), this chapter studies the role of consumer trust in retail personalisation. We draw empirical insights from focus-group interviews conducted with Swedish consumers regarding three main aspects: (1) consumer sentiment on data collection; (2) data-dependent retail personalisation; and (3) the digitised market logic that follows from platformisation. Firstly, the results indicate that the level of trust that consumers have in general for data collection is of relevance to how successful retailers’ use of recommendations systems and targeted ads will be. Secondly, and echoing earlier studies, user agreements and privacy notices are something that most interviewees find hard to comprehend and pay attention to. Thirdly, data collection, automation, and personalisation are often third-party dependent and platformised. To consumers, this adds to a lack of transparency and a sense of losing control of their data, which should be taken as a call to action as regards retailers being more attentive to consumer trust and avoiding third-party sharing to the extent it is possible.