Cognitive personalization

Personalization
We define personalization as tailoring a consumer product, electronic or written medium to a user based on personal details or characteristics they provide. More recently, it has especially been applied in the context of the World Wide Web. Personalization, as we define it, thus is a mental operation initiated by the reader and elicited by the external stimuli. In a broader sense, personalization also may refer to a tailored environment, product, service, or technology. Thus, personalization could mean the deliberate decoration or modification of the environment to fit a person's tastes or preferences, such as decorating one's own room or engaging in a process that changes the functionality, interface, information content, or distinctiveness of a product, service, or system such as a Web site interface. The purpose of personalization is to increase the element's personal relevance to an individual. Research shows that consumers welcome personalized product offerings and that personalized messages enhance responsiveness. Consumers perceive personalized offers as more relevant to their needs and better aligned with their preferences, which in turn enhances their purchase intentions.

Our concept of cognitive personalization differs from the traditional concept of personalization, which is primarily physical. Cognitive personalization is a mental operation that takes place in a person's mind. In the medical field, defines personalization as a cognitive operation by which people interpret events in a self-referential manner. Beck addresses certain disorders that cause people to practice self-referential thinking excessively; in our definition, we refer to self-referential thinking that occurs as a result of emotional resonance with a message.

Antecedents of Cognitive Personalization
The level of cognitive personalization experienced by a consumer reading an online review depends on a variety of factors. We discuss three factors and their relationships with personalization: (1) affect intensity, an individual trait; (2) type of review, or experiential versus factual; and (3) the nature of the product, namely, search versus experience goods.

Affect intensity. Affect intensity (AI) is an individual difference that refers to people's emotional responses to various events. People with high AI are more likely to be bursting with joy in happy situations and sense the end of the world when facing a disconcerting problem. Those with relatively higher AI also are more likely to respond to an event with more intense emotions and be responsive to a wider spectrum of emotions, both positive and negative.

Type of review. The extent to which information seekers sense resonance with a review may depend on the nature of the review. In a review, consumers look for cues that suggest validity. With no apparent demographic or background information about a reviewer, such cues likely come from the content of the review, which might be predominantly factual or experiential. Factual reviews focus on plain facts, such as product attributes, whereas experiential reviews may focus on the reviewer's own specific experience when buying or using the product.

Nature of the product. Products can be classified as search or experience goods. Search goods, such as electronics, are products that consumers can evaluate according to their specific attributes before purchase. Experience goods, such as recreational services, vary across consumers and are difficult to describe using specific attributes. Experience goods thus typically must be evaluated by affective evaluative cues (i.e., aesthetics of the product), whereas search goods may be evaluated by instrumental evaluative cues (i.e., technical or performance aspects of a product).