As you know, I’ve been wondering a lot why mass customization is so much bigger in Germany than in the US, and my blog post (see link) tries to answer that question. Recently, another idea came to my head: Could it be that Germans are culturally more interested in creating their own?
What brought this idea to mind was that I had noticed for quite a while now that Americans and Germans have very different ways of building houses. In the US, houses are built by companies, who plan the houses and then sell them during and after the construction. It’s quite efficient, and the producers have all sorts of data on what the majority likes, which they use when they build many and many of these houses.
In Germany, people tend to buy a piece of land and then proceed to build the houses themselves - sometimes with similar companies in a turnkey project, sometimes with many different contractors. What’s different about the German approach is that the house buyers/ builders are very involved in the creation and its details: Even if it’s a turnkey construction, they usually pick everything from floor tiles to door handles.
Now, to throw this crazy idea out: Could it be that Germans just like to be more involved in the the creation of the “stuff” they consume? Could it be that Germans experience a form of co-creation in several aspects of their lives and are thus more likely to (a) get excited when a design-your-own website launches and (b) more likely to launch such a business themselves?
How much of the proliferance (at least relatively) of mass customization in Germany is due to
In my recent presentation at the Smart Customization Seminar I made the point that Mass Customization is much bigger in Germany by showing the following image, comparing the number of mass customization companies in Germany vs those I could find in the US:
Note that I even included Burger King in the list of U.S. mass customizers because they advertise as “have it your way”, which is a stretch of the definition of a mass customizer.
Two observations can be made by looking at this list:
a) There are a lot more mass customizers in Germany than in the US!
b) Among the mass customizers in the U.S. are more large companies - like Nike, Dell, and M&Ms
This was underscored by the fact that it seemed that at the conference half of the attendees were German, and that in a benchmark analysis of 500 (as many as are known) mass customizers (RWW), 34% had a .de domain (which is only a portion of all German mass customizers).
So why is mass customization so much bigger in Germany? Here are two potential reasons as to why:
1) In European countries, there’s just less “mass” (production) “Everything is bigger in America”. The Americans were the first ones to master mass production - think Ford and the T-Model, and a product mass produced for/ in the US has a much larger scale than say in Germany because it serves a market of 300 million, not 80 million people. Hence, consumers in the US are used to big brands and standardization across 50 states. In Europe, that is not the case. What you see in a German supermarket is likely to be very different from say an Italian supermarket. I believe that that probably primes Europeans to be more likely to adopt unique, mass customized products that are not all exactly the same.
2) The funding environment for startups The drivers of mass customization in Germany are startups. Tiny startups, mostly founded by Generation Y entrepreneurs. The European marketplace of investors and ventures to invest in is much smaller and not as efficient as the one in the US, which requires many of these young entrepreneurs to start a business that they can self-fund with little capital. Mass Customization does that - it requires little investment because you can start with customization on a small scale, and it is cash flow friendly
Finally, it is a fact that some trends just get started outside of the US - like the “green movement” that is bringing quite a European behavior to the United States. Maybe in a similar way, mass customization is now coming to the US? As to why it started out in Germany in the first place - I’m sure there are other reasons but the two mentioned above, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts on it.
Today I googled mass customization (well, mass customisation) in the UK - and found nothing. Now, I might not be the most versed googler and also didn’t spend too much time on it, but how can there be no examples of mass customization in the UK? I even shouted it out on twitter (I tweet about mass customization with my @papillonc account), - no examples! I could not find one mass customization company from the UK. We know that mymuesli.de has a UK website, but that’s it. Please let me know if you know of any!
Funny enough, I found the abstract to a research paper, comparing mass customization (-customisation) in the UK vs. Turkey (why Turkey?), and the finding was this: “A large proportion of customers from both countries would be willing to pay extra to own a product which exactly meets their needs and preferences. However, more respondents in the Turkish sample were willing to do so than in the UK sample.” So it’s not that the UK consumers abhor mass customization (although the Turkish clearly are more trendy in this regard), but why do entrepreneurs ignore it?
Which of course makes me think of US vs. Germany. I see a lot of mass customization in the US in the fields of fashion and food, and while fashion seems to be more of an American stronghold, a lot of the food mass customization startups have someone German, or at least German-speaking, on their founding team. Checking mass customization directories like egoo.de or milkorsugar further confirms that there are more food mass customization startups in Germany than in the US, including notable US companies like elementbars, [me] & goji or mixmygranola.com who I was fortunate to meet last week.
A few days ago, an Austrian business student interviewed me on the topic of mass customization for her bachelor thesis, and one question she asked was how I expect mass customization to evolve in the future. Now, I’m no Professor Pine or Professor Piller, but I’m obviously betting my personal future on it. I think that we will see lots of growth in mass customization - many products are not available yet in a customized format. Many existing examples of mass customization are not sold in every country yet. And sooner or later, there will be competition in each niche - see the two cereal companies mentioned above in the US market. Then, I expect larger companies to jump on the train - maybe not as efficiently as the startups in the beginning, but soon on a much bigger scale. Which reminds me - have I told you yet about Hershey’s opening a “create-your-own” attraction in their amusement park “Chocolate World” in Hershey, PA? They’ve been on our site a lot (Google Analytics knows everything), so we’re flattered! I can’t wait to go when it opens in the summer.
We, chocri, have been received in the US with open arms, and are as thrilled as you about our expansion. That for us is a sign that mass customization is ready to spread to more countries. What do you think?
What brought this idea to mind was that I had noticed for quite a while now that Americans and Germans have very different ways of building houses. In the US, houses are built by companies, who plan the houses and then sell them during and after the construction. It’s quite efficient, and the producers have all sorts of data on what the majority likes, which they use when they build many and many of these houses. 
A few days ago, an Austrian business student interviewed me on the topic of mass customization for her bachelor thesis, and one question she asked was how I expect mass customization to evolve in the future. Now, I’m no Professor Pine or Professor Piller, but I’m obviously betting my personal future on it. I think that we will see lots of growth in mass customization - many products are not available yet in a customized format. Many existing examples of mass customization are not sold in every country yet. And sooner or later, there will be competition in each niche - see the two cereal companies mentioned above in the US market. Then, I expect larger companies to jump on the train - maybe not as efficiently as the startups in the beginning, but soon on a much bigger scale. Which reminds me - have I told you yet about Hershey’s opening a “create-your-own” attraction in their amusement park “Chocolate World” in Hershey, PA? They’ve been on our site a lot (Google Analytics knows everything), so we’re flattered! I can’t wait to go when it opens in the summer.
