The power of personalization
This dissertation focuses on the effectiveness of personalization in marketing communications and healthcare management. The first study uses meta-analysis to quantify the overall impact of personalization and its four key strategies on consumer responses. Results show that the combination of content relevance and explicit self-reference, content relevance, and implicit self-reference, generate significantly stronger effects than explicit self-reference alone. The effectiveness of personalization varies across product types, cultural contexts, and incentivized settings. Explicit self-reference is more effective for search products, consumers from collectivist cultures, and incentivized contexts, while content relevance works better for experience products, high-involvement products, consumers from individualistic cultures, and incentivized settings. The second study investigates goal personalization in healthcare through a large-scale field study. Both personalized-by-you and personalized-by-the-algorithm strategies motivate users to take more steps, but they are effective for different groups. Personalized-by-you works best for medium and highly active users, whereas personalized-by-the-algorithm is more effective for low and medium active users. Overall, this dissertation advances the understanding of the power of personalization, particularly personalized communication in marketing and goal personalization in health management, and offers insights for improving the design and implementation of effective personalization strategies.