Navigating the Aisles

Various retailers worldwide are enacting personalisation strategies to provide their consumers personalised content. Studies have shown that these personalisation strategies play a significant role in their ability to achieve a competitive advantage. Over the past decade, retailers around the world have experimented with offering highly personalised content by utilising the collected user data from their digital and physical buying experience. This is done to achieve more seamless and deeper levels of personalisation across different touchpoints beyond transaction data. This personalisation is driven both by collecting data about consumers’ online behaviour and about their real-life behaviour captured by in-store sensors, such as Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures and consumer-operated interactive digital screens. Although previous research outlined how the implementation of smart objects improves or deteriorates the social dynamics and interactions between consumers and retailers and what individual factors affect consumers’ intention to adopt new technologies, it remains unknown how the behaviour of Dutch consumers is affected when Technology-enabled Personalisation (TEP) technologies are implemented by supermarkets. Additionally, it is unclear how supermarkets could implement TEP technologies in a way that suits Dutch consumers’ needs and what measures should be taken for protecting their privacy. Unravelling these gaps assist supermarkets in achieving a competitive advantage in which consumer-object relationships are created that foster a positive privacy calculus and increase consumers’ technology adoption. This study aims to fill this gap by answering how TEP technologies used in the grocery retail sector affect consumers’ behaviour in the Netherlands. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted to gain a thorough understanding of consumers' perspectives, experiences, and perceptions when interacting with TEP technologies. Two scenarios were devised in which participants reflected on their imaginary interaction with TEP technologies. Each scenario was depicted as a storyboard to increase the clarity of the context in which these technologies will be used. This study found that Dutch consumers should have more control over their own decisions and over the actions of the implemented technologies than the technologies themselves, making that consumers should be the final decision-maker. This entails that technology usage should be voluntary and that consumers must be voluntarily informed about supermarkets’ substantiation on their data collection procedure. Moreover, consumers desire a transparent explanation on supermarkets’ data collection procedure to improve their perceived data congruence on datapoints to be collected and to make informed choices about what personal data to share. Consumers also stressed that the presence of an independent external party that monitor supermarkets’ working of their data collection practices will increase the reliability of supermarkets’ substantiation. To protect consumers’ privacy, TEP technologies should ask for consumers’ consent before enacting decisions. Recommendations should also be as private as possible, as consumers preferred staying anonymous during grocery shopping. Lastly, consumers expect the depicted recommendations to be highly personalised in order to assist them during grocery shopping. This can be achieved by providing content adapted to consumers’ eating style and by assisting them in navigating and remembering what products to buy.