Agency cues in personalized chatbot advertising: the role of grammatical subject framing, privacy concern, and social role

This research examines how personalization and grammatical-subject framing in chatbot advertising shape privacy concern and advertising effectiveness. Across two experiments, we manipulated personalization (high vs. low) and grammatical subject (AI “I” vs. consumer “you”). Study 1 (N = 396) showed that, under high personalization, AI-subject framing increased privacy concern, which in turn reduced brand attitude and purchase intention. Study 2 (N = 302) replicated this moderated mediation pattern in a different product category and examined chatbot social role as a boundary condition. Privacy concern had stronger negative effects on advertising outcomes when the chatbot adopted a friend role rather than a servant role. Overall, the findings identify grammatical-subject framing as a sentence-level agency cue and show that relational role framing can strengthen or weaken the persuasive costs of privacy concern in personalized conversational AI.