The personal paradox matrix: understanding and mitigating customer tensions in phygital marketing

Although customers value personalization, they often experience complex and conflicting dualities with personalized market offerings, particularly within phygital marketing environments. Adopting an interpretive qualitative method and based on 36 in-depth interviews with customers from three countries, we uncover that customer responses to personalization can be categorized into three dimensions: content, privacy, and influence, aligned with psychological dissonance, privacy paradox, and psychological reactance theories. Furthermore, the findings reveal innovative customer responses, demonstrating how different customer cohorts mitigate tensions arising from personalization across these three dimensions. We propose a novel concept termed the “Personal Paradox Matrix” that offers four innovative strategies—Avoidance, Acceptance, Synthesis, and Neutral— on how firms can effectively navigate and mitigate the tensions arising from personalization. These strategies enable marketers to develop tailored approaches by profiling and segmenting customers effectively.