Product, Consumer, and Digital Marketing: A Matter of Privacy and Trust

At the turn of the century, the development of technologies and the consequent increase in electronic channel users led to an excessively positive forecast of the virtual marketplace’s potentialities. In turn, this led to the well-known ‘Internet bubble’ phenomenon. Following the collapse of the new economy, many studies have investigated the causes of this phenomenon. Their results converge, revealing that online transaction problems are mainly due to the high level of risk and uncertainty characterizing this marketplace and the lack of trust that could overcome this. Customers seem to increasingly rely on the Internet as an information tool, but do not actually make purchases on the virtual channel. Firms try to avoid this behavior by offering different types of incentives. In the chapter we review the phenomenon of data collection in a virtual marketplace and its main challenges for firms. We therefore review the results of some studies aimed at investigating two main antecedents of customers’ information disclosure identified in the literature: trust and incentive.