Customer perspective to sharing location based data

Abstract

Location Based Service (LBS) has the potential to be one of the most influential aspects in the digital business world. LBS opens a large amount of opportunities to the business world and gives access to customers directly in real time. LBS is capable of creating customer value by delivering context-relevant messages directly to customers based on their current location, activities, interests, and preferences. Additionally, in order for the LBS to function properly and bring the expected outcomes, it is vital to have the essential technological solution, as well as to understand customers’ perspectives of sharing location based data (LBD). Although, remarkable progress has been made in LBS technology on the research and development side, customers’ perspectives of LBD is largely unexplored, especially in academia. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to build a customer perspective to sharing LBD. In order to do that, customer value has been chosen as the key theoretical concept. Customer value is widely used in identifying customers’ perceived benefits and sacrifices. The study has been conducted by taking an interpretive approach based on qualitative data, collected through focus group discussion and face-to-face interview. The results indicated that people’s willingness to share location data varies on several characteristics. Consumer identified navigation, exploring a new place, getting discounts and being part of the society are some of the fundamental perceived benefits of sharing LBD. On the other hand, sharing LBD comes with certain risks, as the data revealed consumer concern over risks involving privacy, physical risks, monetary risks, and risks of intrusion.