Increasing Consumers’ Willingness to Engage in Data Disclosure Processes through Relevance-Illustrating Game Elements

Abstract Encouraging consumers to enter a data disclosure process constitutes a crucial challenge for retailers. This paper suggests that retailers can lever consumers’ willingness to enter disclosure processes through the design of their data requests. Four experimental studies confirm that consumers are more likely to comply with a data request if retailers do not only use textual relevance arguments but also augment them with relevance-illustrating game elements to further underpin the purpose of data disclosure. This favorable effect can be delineated according to dual-processing models of decision-making: Relevance-illustrating game elements amplify the positive effect of textual relevance arguments by helping consumers to a) cognitively appreciate the objective benefits of data disclosure (i.e., meaningful engagement) and b) increase hedonic engagement on the affective processing route. However, arbitrarily chosen game elements which solely aim at entertaining without conveying the purpose of data disclosure, do not yield these positive effects. Finally, the authors show that the proposed approach is especially worthwhile for retailers facing customers with low trust levels, whereas customers with high trust levels are likely to comply with the data request regardless.