Every time you scroll through your phone, you encounter ads that seem to know you. They reference your recent searches, reflect your interests, and sometimes even seem to echo your personality. This kind of personalized messaging is now a standard tool in marketing, politics, and health communication. But does tailoring a message to an individual always make it more persuasive? And if not, when does it fail?
A research review published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology set out to organize decades of findings on this topic into a single framework. The review, led by Jacob D. Teeny of Northwestern University along with colleagues Joseph J. Siev and Richard E. Petty of The Ohio State University and Pablo Briñol of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, examined what researchers call “personalized matching.” That term refers to aligning some feature of a persuasive appeal, whether it is the message’s content, the person delivering it, or the environment where it is received, with a characteristic of the person on the receiving end.
The central takeaway from the review is that while personalized matching generally boosts persuasion, it can also reduce it. The outcome depends on what the match means to the consumer and how much mental effort the consumer puts into processing the message.
What is personalized matching, exactly?
The concept is straightforward in principle. A persuasive situation involves four classic elements: a recipient, a message, a source (the person or entity delivering the message), and a setting. Personalized matching is when one of those elements, the message, the source, or the setting, is aligned with something about the recipient. This alignment is sometimes also called tailoring, targeting, or customizing.
The review traces this idea all the way back to Aristotle, who noted the value of adapting a speech to an audience. The modern version of this practice has been turbocharged by technology. With access to vast amounts of consumer data, companies and political campaigns can now match messages to people’s personality traits, emotional states, cultural backgrounds, and purchasing goals at scale.
The many dimensions of a person that can be matched
One of the review’s contributions is cataloging the wide range of personal characteristics that researchers have used as targets for matching. These fall into several broad categories.
The first category involves a person’s emotional and cognitive states. Research has shown, for example, that people experiencing higher levels of psychological arousal (a subjective feeling of energy) respond more favorably to louder or more exciting advertisements. People in a positive mood tend to prefer messages framed around good outcomes, while people in a negative mood tend to respond better to messages framed around avoiding bad outcomes. Even specific emotions matter: a person who is feeling sad, for instance, may be more persuaded by a message that addresses sadness rather than anger.
A second category involves goals and motivational orientations. People who are shopping for pleasure respond differently than people who are shopping for practical needs. Someone hungry responds more favorably to an ad emphasizing the energizing qualities of a product. A person who is generally motivated by seeking rewards (known as an “approach orientation”) tends to be more responsive to incentive-based appeals, while a person motivated by avoiding negative outcomes (an “avoidance orientation”) responds more to appeals framed around preventing losses.
A third major category is the basis of a person’s attitude, meaning the foundation on which their opinion rests. Some people’s opinions are rooted in emotion, while others are based on factual reasoning. Some attitudes are based on moral convictions, and some serve social functions, like helping a person fit in with a group. Matching a message to these underlying bases tends to increase its effectiveness. For example, research has found that consumers who hold emotionally based attitudes toward a product are more persuaded by a taste test, while those with fact-based attitudes are more persuaded by data about the product’s ingredients.
Personality traits are a fourth target. Studies using the Big Five personality model, which categorizes people along dimensions like extraversion and openness, have found that ads tailored to a person’s dominant trait increase purchase intentions. This strategy was reportedly used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential election, a claim that has been debated in terms of its actual impact but supported in laboratory and field experiments.
Finally, cultural orientations matter. People from Western cultures, who tend to see themselves as independent individuals, respond differently than people from Eastern cultures, who tend to see themselves as interconnected with others. Matching a message to a person’s culturally shaped self-view has been shown to enhance persuasion.
It’s not just what you say, but who says it and where
Most research has focused on matching the content of a message to a recipient. But the review also covers source-to-recipient and setting-to-recipient matches. Any form of similarity between a message’s source and its recipient tends to boost persuasion. For example, emotionally intense consumers are more persuaded by emotionally intense spokespeople. Consumers whose attitudes are based on social image respond better to attractive sources, while those whose attitudes are based on knowledge respond better to expert sources.
Setting also plays a role. A field study found that emotional background music in a store increased purchases among impulsive shoppers, while ambient scent, which tends to promote contemplation, was more effective for non-impulsive shoppers. Online, hedonic shoppers (those browsing for pleasure) prefer immersive websites, while utilitarian shoppers (those with a specific task) prefer clean navigation and search tools.
When matching backfires
This is where the review’s framework becomes especially useful for practitioners. Whether a personalized match helps or hurts persuasion depends on two things: the meaning the match generates for the consumer (positive or negative) and the consumer’s level of mental engagement with the message.
A match can generate negative meaning in several ways. If a consumer perceives that a tailored message is an invasion of privacy, that reaction can sour the entire appeal. If the message feels like an attempt at manipulation, or if it seems to be based on a stereotype about the consumer’s group, it can trigger resistance. Research has found, for instance, that when overweight consumers believed a weight-loss message was sent to them specifically because of their weight, they felt unfairly judged. This negative reaction led them to generate more negative thoughts about the message and ultimately reduced their intention to adopt healthier behaviors.
The consumer’s level of thinking also matters, and the review uses a well-known psychological framework called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to explain how. The ELM describes a continuum from low to high mental effort. When consumers are not thinking hard, perhaps because they are distracted or uninterested, a personalized match works as a simple signal. If that signal feels positive (“this is relevant to me”), it boosts persuasion. If it feels negative (“this is creepy”), it reduces persuasion. The quality of the actual arguments in the message matters very little in this state.
When consumers are thinking hard, however, the match operates through more complex channels. It can be evaluated as an argument on its own merits. A match to one’s moral values, for example, could be seen as a strong reason to support a product, but only if morality is relevant to the product category. If it is not relevant, a high-thinking consumer may dismiss the match as trivial, even though a low-thinking consumer would have accepted it as a feel-good cue.
High-thinking consumers can also experience a biasing effect, where the match steers their thoughts in a positive or negative direction, or a validation effect, where the match increases their confidence in thoughts they have already formed. In one study, consumers who received strong arguments and then learned the message source matched their personality reported greater confidence in their positive thoughts, which led to more persuasion. But when the arguments were weak and consumers’ thoughts were negative, the same kind of match validated those negative thoughts, reducing persuasion.
What this means for businesses and marketers
The review offers several practical implications. First, personalized matching is generally effective, but it is not a magic bullet. The quality of the message’s arguments still matters, especially when consumers are paying close attention. If a message contains weak arguments and the match causes consumers to scrutinize them more closely, the strategy can backfire.
Second, businesses should be attentive to how consumers might interpret personalization. If a message feels too precisely tailored, using a consumer’s transaction history, for example, or information clearly gathered from a different website, it is more likely to trigger privacy concerns and negative reactions. Some research suggests that consumers are less likely to react negatively if they have previously consented to share their data.
Third, matching to more personally important or socially distinctive characteristics tends to produce stronger effects. A consumer whose minority group identity is salient, for instance, may be a more responsive target for matching, but only if the match does not feel stigmatizing.
Fourth, matching multiple characteristics at once can amplify the effect. One study found that messages matching both a consumer’s self-construal and their motivational orientation were more persuasive than messages matching only one dimension. However, targeting too many dimensions simultaneously could also raise suspicions of manipulation.
Finally, the review notes that attitude changes produced under conditions of high thinking tend to be more durable over time, more resistant to counterarguments, and more likely to influence actual behavior. This means that marketers seeking long-lasting persuasion effects should aim to engage consumers in deeper thinking about well-constructed, matched messages rather than relying on superficial cues.
The review is illustrative rather than exhaustive, drawing primarily from the psychological, consumer, and marketing literatures. Its proposed framework, the researchers note, represents the first attempt to organize the wide variety of consumer characteristics and psychological processes involved in personalized matching under a single model. It also highlights numerous open questions, including how to determine when a match will generate a positive versus a negative meaning and how different types of positive meanings might lead to different outcomes.
