2019 2019: Center for Marketing Research launches new White Paper Series

The Series, sponsored by BayCoast Bank, will feature social media studies on American companies

The UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently announced the BayCoast Bank White Paper Series. The Series will consist of three research articles per year that take a comprehensive look at the social media habits of Fortune 500 companies and industries plus topical studies.

The first entry in the series is a topical study that focuses on privacy concerns among Generation Z pertaining to social media, mobile payment services, and smart speakers. While privacy concerns among Generation Z is notably high, they continue to utilize the many technologies available to them according to the latest study conducted by Shannen Pavao, MBA, UMass Dartmouth Alumnus and Associate Director of the Center for Marketing Research. The study was co-authored by Nadia Khalil MSF from the London School of Economics.

The new report is the outcome of a study derived from data collected from students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, to capture the entire undergraduate population of Generation Z students at UMass Dartmouth. This approach provides the opportunity to understand the problem being investigated among the target demographic. The use of a survey enabled quantitative results and the discovery of links that are common between privacy concerns and Generation Z.

“Because Gen Z is estimated to comprise the largest segment of the US population, the Center for Marketing Research aims to track their behavior throughout the upcoming years, featuring the findings in BayCoast Bank’s White Paper Series,” stated Pavao.

Key findings of this study include:

• More than half of respondents stated they were very concerned about privacy when using mobile payment services and online banking.
• 63% of respondents created their first social media account by the age of 13.
• 82% of respondents stated they were somewhat or very concerned about privacy when using social networking sites, yet 97% of respondents currently have at least one active social media account.
• Of the four social networking sites examined in this study, Snapchat had the highest proportion of users with private accounts at 83% followed by Facebook at 73%.
• 74% of respondents are somewhat or very concerned with facial recognition software automatically identifying, archiving and/or tagging their face on social media.
• 78% of respondents indicated they were using mobile payment services with 81% of those indicating it was a requirement to link their bank account information to use the app. Respectively, 48% worry that the platforms are sharing their personal banking information with third parties.
• 37% of respondents stated that they have a smart speaker in their home, 84% of which think the devices are vulnerable to hackers.

The Center’s mission is to facilitate the economic development of the region by providing an affordable, high-quality economic alternative to meeting business needs for research, training, and consulting in any and all aspects of Marketing.  This work is primarily conducted by graduate and undergraduate marketing students.