We Need Your Consent: Exploring How CSR-Conforming Companies Deal With Technoethical Challenges of Personalized Marketing

With the rise of AI and rapidly increasing technological affordances and computing power, predictive analytics based personalized marketing (PABPM) practices are becoming exponentially more complex. Their deployment is likewise facing increased ethical scrutiny, and socially conscious corporations with established Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies must now navigate relatively new concepts and a user base that is more sensitive to a misuse of their data. This thesis investigates the ways in which fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) conglomerates, which process very high volumes of user data every day, engage with key technoethical challenges, aiming to answer the research question “How are CSR conforming FMCG companies dealing with key data privacy concerns in predictive analytics based personalized marketing?” The research was carried out on 10 privacy policies from FMCG conglomerates, representing the policies of companies that jointly made almost $600 billion in annual turnover. The privacy policies were collected and analyzed using deductive reflexive thematic analysis in multiple rounds. Initial and focused codes were generated before being collated into six distinct themes. The six themes are Commitment to Technoethical Action, Exemplary Corporate Citizen, Informing the Consumer, Showcasing Accessibility to the Consumer, Justification of Data Management Practices, and, finally, Overlooking Consumer Concerns, An additional 8 sub-themes were also discovered. The analysis revealed that certain CSR-conforming companies have relatively robust data privacy policies and appear to view consumer data privacy as an extension of their existing CSR initiatives, supporting and strengthening existing findings in this field. These results also supplement a growing body of research surrounding the developing concept of Corporate Digital Responsibility and help inform researchers and consumers alike both how CSR-compliant FMCG conglomerates are treating their personal data, as well as where they fall short of consumer expectations. Future research should build on this study by closely evaluating the internal processes that take place within FMCG conglomerates that determine how companies prioritize what user data should be collected and leveraged for PABPM purposes. Finally, future research should also include a comparative analysis of different types of companies across various industries, exploring how various industry pressures and market forces can affect the ways in which consumer data is collected, tracked, processed and analyzed, and the impact thereof on consumer perception.