Count me in!—Permission Marketing in German professional football

Abstract

A central challenge of digital transformation is the handling of privacy data. For direct and personal communication with consumers (e.g. via e‑mail), organizations need prior consent of their customers. However, institutions in all sectors, including professional soccer clubs, have difficulty obtaining this consent. Therefore, this paper aims to work out how the acquisition of the fans’ marketing permission can be designed with a high stimulative nature (and in compliance with EU-GDPR requirements). The willingness to consent to marketing permission should be seen as a privacy calculus trade-off, which is mapped in particular by an individual’s privacy concerns and willingness to provide personal information. To derive the intended insights, an explorative online experiment with 624 respondents was conducted to investigate whether clubs can influence the customers’ willingness to disclose information as well as their privacy concerns by using incentives, explanatory texts or by differing the acquisition channel, and if the loyalty to a club has an influencing effect. It turns out that a detailed explanatory text during the acquisition and the choice of an appropriate acquisition channel can significantly increase the willingness to disclose personal information and reduce privacy concerns. In addition, customers of professional football clubs per se do have and also (to a lesser extent) as determined by their loyalty, lower data privacy concerns than customers of traditional companies. Although this seems to simplify the acquisition of marketing permissions, it should not be misunderstood by the clubs as an easy win, but rather understood as a leap of faith with an increased need for transparency. In practice, professional clubs have so far made little use of this potential, tending instead to act nontransparent and with an optimizable legal compliance.