Customers’ Willingness to Disclose Personal Information throughout the Customer Purchase Journey in Retailing: The Role of Perceived Warmth

Consumers show increasing levels of concern regarding disclosing information to companies, as retailers’ access to their personal informationheightens their feelings of vulnerability. Although customers’ personal information is crucial for targeting actual and potential customers, the extantdiscussion regarding the determinants of customers’ willingness to disclose personal information is limited. Drawing upon social judgment theory,this study investigates how consumers experience different levels of perceived warmth, which alleviates privacy concerns and, in turn, affects theirwillingness to disclose personal information during different stages of the online customer purchase journey.A mixed-method design combining a focus group (Study 1), an online experiment, a field study and a laboratory experiment (Studies 2, 3and 4) provide a multifaceted representation of this phenomenon. The results show that compared to the prepurchase phase, asking for personalinformation at the end of the online customer purchase journey (i.e., purchase and postpurchase phases) leads to a higher perception of warmthand lower privacy concerns, thereby increasing customers’ disclosure of personal data. The findings are robust to consumers’ brand familiarity andother relevant sociodemographic variables. This research provides insightful theoretical and practical implications for retailers regarding how toenhance perceived warmth and improve customers’ willingness to disclose personal information.