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.