Sales and marketing professionals have long recognized that personalization is an excellent strategy for increasing customer satisfaction and sales returns. In the on-line context, the practitioner literature has also suggested using mass personalization methods to increase on-line customer satisfaction. However, to-date, the personalization methods employed by on-line vendors rely on rather simple heuristics, such as age, gender, and interests, which are too simple to be useful. More importantly, these methods appear to have little or no theoretical basis.

This project puts forward a systematic way of fulfilling personalization. It suggests using human values as a basis to segment customers to provide them with personalized Web site features. While this approach has received considerable attention and has been found fruitful in marketing research, so far, it has received little attention from information systems researchers. This project proposes that a provision of Web features that fit customer values is likely to fulfil customer needs and preferences, thus increasing their satisfaction level with the Web sites. The study examines both theoretically and empirically whether a fit between values and features will result in customer desire toward the features and overall satisfaction with the Web site.