The role of privacy management in brand protection and brand value

Abstract

There are more privacy issues and concerns with the use of a growing number of invasive technologies. This research determines if there is a role that privacy management plays on brand protection and brand value. An extensive literature review was conducted and a proposal for a new privacy-brand model, with hypotheses connecting 4 constructs: privacy practices (PP), brand protection (BP), experienced harms (EH), and brand value (BV) was proposed and then enhanced with the privacy concerns (PC) construct. A preliminary survey was conducted to capture up-to-date privacy concerns from experts in security and privacy. The findings informed a formal survey instrument, Privacy Management Survey, which included both new and existing scales for the constructs that were subsequently validated. Study 1 contributes major themes for privacy concerns related to private information, using NVivo to analyze the qualitative data: (1) unauthorized access (2) misuse, particularly financial information, which is the area that is most harmed in identity theft (3) unauthorized disclosure (4) huge scope of privacy loss, and (5) need for better privacy protections. Two versions of the privacy-brand models were studied: one without privacy concerns (study 2) and one with privacy concerns (study 3). The constructs for all models were extracted using principal components analysis in SPSS, and their relationships confirmed using structural equation modeling in AMOS. The Privacy Management Survey was widely deployed to collect empirical data (N = 315) and (N = 205 holdout sample) to test the hypotheses of the privacy-brand model related to an organization. This work contributes a new model connecting privacy practices, experienced harms, privacy concerns, brand protection, and brand value to the management, management information systems, marketing and risk literatures. Empirical testing of the hypotheses has confirmed that privacy management plays a significant role in brand protection and brand value.