Control Creates Comfort: The Importance of Proactive Response to Privacy Concerns

Recent marketing essays emphasize the need for the marketing discipline to encompass more than merely solving immediate problems with a narrow focus on consumers and mandate a broadening of the field to include value creation for all citizen-consumers. We provide a mixed methods approach and contribute to the privacy theory literature by examining important attitudinal components, within a broader citizen-consumer ‘marketing as society’ context. Study 1 qualitatively analyzes a total of 332 citizen comments collected during a 2 month period from a forum. Study 2 provides a quantitative structural equation model, utilizing a 291 non-student US-based sample. Our findings show that an individual’s ability to have control over private information is an imperative consideration from which to devise an adequate marketing message; in turn, the societally-relevant policy will be well received by the citizen-consumer.

Given the importance of consumer privacy concerns, there is a need to address public policy oriented questions relating to privacy and how to design privacy policies (Balasubramanian et al. 2002). Specifically, governmental organizations must understand how to design privacy policies which achieve an appropriate balance so that the saliency of information privacy concerns is achieved. We examine this question with a mixed methods approach; first, a qualitative study identifies the important policy themes and then a quantitative structural equation model tests the relationships between them (e.g. Adjei et al. 2010). Our paper first introduces privacy theory and the surrounding literature as a framework for our inquiry. Next, we discuss the substantive domain of the public policy in question, Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), identifying it as an important transportation policy for which a state Department of Transportation needs to mitigate consumer-citizen privacy concerns. Following this, we delve into our hypotheses and introduce a qualitative study [Study 1] which examines 332 comments surrounding a transportation initiative to derive key concepts and their relative importance for consumers. We then examine a quantitative structural equation model with a 291 non-student quota convenience sample [Study 2] to test our hypotheses.

An individual’s ability to have control over private information is an imperative consideration from which to devise an adequate marketing message; in turn, the societally-relevant policy will be well received by the citizen-consumer. Our two studies provide implications for government policy makers, such as an understanding of the impact of personality traits. Such individual differences include need for control among others, and are directly related to information privacy.