Anne Sunikka

What, Who and Where: Insights into Personalization

Personalization is a phenomenon that intrigues and confuses. Personalized offerings promise customer attention, loyalty and safe haven against commoditization. However, these promises do not materialize unless customers accept personalization as a means to enhance their consuming experience. Three points of views are offered to personalization in this paper. An analysis of various personalization concepts shows that the basic concept of personalization is reaching maturity even though fresh views are added to it, e.g. context-based personalization. Secondly, a text-mining based approach profiles the personalization research based on bibliometric data on nearly 800 articles, and indicates that the research field is fairly fragmented, and that mass customization and customization research clearly diverges from personalization research. Based on a selection of articles, a further analysis classifies the type of research and research contexts that are the most common. Finally, this research also suggests a conceptualization of personalization.

Enriching Literature Reviews with Computer-Assisted Research Mining. Case: Profiling Group Support Systems Research

In this paper we discuss and demonstrate how traditional literature reviews may be enriched by computer-assisted research profiling. Research profiling makes use of sophisticated text mining tools designed for structured science and technology information resources, such as the ISI Web of science, INSPEC or ABI/INFORM ProQuest. Besides aiding in summarizing and visualizing knowledge domains, these research mining tools act as interactive decision support systems for researchers. We illustrate research profiling with 2.000 publications on group support systems between years 1982-2005

Empirical investigation into the multi-faceted trust in the wealth management context

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the many manifestations of trust in the wealth management context in Finland. This empirical paper examines and contrasts how trust is perceived by financial experts and consumers in wealth management in general, and in the investment context, in particular.Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative methods, focus group discussions and interviews were employed.Findings – Financial experts and consumers emphasised different facets of trust. The level of trust towards financial service providers and financial advisors, and the level of involvement in investing served to differentiate the consumers into four distinct groups. These are presented and discussed.Research limitations/implications – Although the methods utilised were purely qualitative and the study was limited to Finland, the results offer interesting and new scientific knowledge about perceived trust, and how it can be used in market segmentation and developing customer service.Practical implication...

Relationship between Uncertainty and Patterns of Pre-purchase Consumer Search in Electronic Markets

Electronic markets are expected to facilitate consumer information search and product comparison to the extent that consumers are able to accumulate nearly perfect information. We present an analysis of search patterns based on a laboratory experiment on product search processes. We identified three types of search patterns in our experiment: sequential, simultaneous, and iterative. We found that search pattern has an impact on search costs and the efficiency of search judged by the purchase price. Sequential search emerged as the still dominant search pattern even though it leads to the most expensive purchase. Simultaneous search seems to combine low search costs with the highest efficiency. Iterative search pattern was the slowest. We also studied the relationship between uncertainty and search pattern, because uncertainty should have an effect on the search pattern employed. We found that uncertainty is strongly related to search behavior, but not to the search pattern employed.