Automated production of customized products! MyMuesli gets their automated filling machine.
The video, unfortunately in German, describes how MyMuesli developed the machine over 8 months. Each ingredient has its own “filling station”, and - after scanning the cereal cylinder to be filled - disperses just as much of the ingredient as is necessary.
(Source: egoo.de)
This is part of my series of blog posts where I define common terms that are related with mass customization. Also see the definitions for mass-customization and co-creation.
This is pretty straight forward. “Design Your Own” and “Create Your Own” is a subset of mass customization. On a “design/create your own” website, you can use a configurator to specify the different elements of a product (the base chocolate and toppings of a chocolate bar, the color of a bike, the fabric, cuffs and pockets of a shirt, the shape and leather of a shoe, the style and gemstones of an earring, …). Then the provider of that website makes the product for you according to your specifications.
In short, the two defining aspects of Design-Your-Own are that you are able to pick and choose different modules of a product in a configurator, and that it’s an experience that is meant to be fun.
The experience
A service that is fun or enjoyable is essentially a good experience. Take your last visit to the hair salon: If your visit was only about the end-result (a nice hair cut), they probably wouldn’t have bothered much about the ambience of the store or the water temperature when they washed your hair. But your time in the hair salon is an experience, something that more and more service providers recognize.
A mass customized good is very much related to a service, and with that it has the potential to be a good experience. The act of making a product just for you has many aspects of a service - it’s personal, and it’s an activity that the company engages in just for you. Also, the design-your-own offering is mostly online, where consumer experience not only can but should be optimized based on the wonderful data that is provided to you thanks to Google Analytics and the likes.
In the “Customization 500” study, it turned out that the “fun of configuration” had the highest impact on the net promoter score for design-your-own offering. What that essentially means for you, the mass customizer: If you can make the design process on the website fun, if you can turn it into a wow-ing experience, you are likely to generate word of mouth and with that essentially free marketing. “Fun on configuration” scored significantly higher than “usability of configurator”, “added value of product” and even the “basic value of the product”. So, go and optimize your website - for fun!
p.s. For more on mass customization and experience, follow @joepine on Twitter.
The configurator
A configurator most typically lets you choose from different “modules” that make up the product - such as colors in the design of a sneaker with NikeiD, or the base chocolate and toppings for a customized chocolate bar with chocri. Also, design your own includes a configurator such as Zazzle provides it, where you can upload your own images and enter your own texts to create a personalized product.
Configurators based on Flash or similar usually have great visualizations (see for example laudividni.com), but are harder to to update. But the better the visualization, the easier it is for the “designer” to devise a creation they like. Keep in mind that most people don’t have deep expertise in the product - thus an easy to use and visually strong configurator is important.
Here’s an overview of the different terms:
This is a continuation of my blog post summarizing the Forrester Report on Mass Customization.
The recent report on Mass Customization by Forrester’s J.P. Gownder gives companies considering to enter the mass customization space some valid recommendations. To start with, it repeats the advice by Prof. Piller to be careful when designing the solution space. The report compares it to the work of a museum curator - there are thousands of wonderful pieces of art, but which ones do you expose to the public? Similarly, there are thousand of beautiful fabrics, but which one do you let your users pick from to create customized shirts?
Second, Forrester reminds budding customization companies to empower customers to be successful in the design process. That can be a very user friendly and very flexible configuration engine, or it might be a guided process from standard product to customized version.
Third, the report places special emphasis on the value a consumer can derive from a mass customized product: Does it solve a real customer need? Are there social benefits (e.g. self expression, or a sense of accomplishment)?
Fourth, Forrester reminds companies interested in mass customization to keep analyzing and predicting what consumers want. A great example is the “thumbs up” and down rating that you can give songs on Pandora - with that small tool, Pandora keeps learning about you and is able to provide you a better product. Also, new features and changes in the solution space fall into this category.
Finally
, Forrester looks into the future a bit further and suggests that the mass customization of the future will be more social, physical (interestingly enough, Forrester suggests technology such as Microsoft Kinect to play a role here), mobile, intimate (in short: even more personalized), embedded (i.e. change products more dramatically), platform-based (e.g. shared technology between all customizers) and co-created (using the data from customization to produce both more meaningful solution spaces and standard products).
The report “Mass Customization Is (Finally) The Future Of Products” can be found here: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/mass_customization_is_finally_future_of_products/q/id/58967/t/2?src=RSS_2&cm_mmc=Forrester-_-RSS-_-Document-_-24
Last Month, Forrester Research released an informative and well researched report on Mass Customization. In it, they write that “after a variety of false starts, its time has finally come”.
In the following and in upcoming blog post, I will summarize the report. However, if you are serious about this topic, I advise you to consider purchasing the Forrester Report directly (and no, I don’t get anything for saying that).
The report begins by referring to the many times that mass customization has been predicted as the future. Joseph Pine published his book about Mass Customization in 1993, that’s soon 20 years ago!
However, the Forrester Report suggests that Mass Customization has “hit an inflection” point now, due to new customer facing technologies that are raising consumers’ expectations, are cheaper and will be even more amazing (and enabling) in the future.
The report then proceeds to outline how there’s a historic continuum that can be observed - from crafting to mass production to… mass customization.
One of the tremendous benefits of Mass Customization that the Forrester Report points out is the new type of “relationship to the consumer” that can be created. A more personal, more loyal, and more profitable relationship.
So why has it taken so long for mass customization to take hold? “Failures of execution, not concept” is Forrester’s answer, and they list four main reasons: Incomplete implementations that didn’t take consumer demand for choices and the solution space into account, the inability of customization companies to manage costs (Dell is quoted as an example), the immaturity of digital experiences as well as nonlocal manufacturing that doesn’t lend itself to on-demand manufacturing without increasing delivery times too much. Finally, the report also suggests that the Paradox of Choice has been one of the forces driving against mass customization.
Forrester then warns that if product strategists at big companies don’t seize this opportunity now, they can expect their competitors beat them to market with customized products. “Now is the time…”. Yet, Forrester acknowledges that it is the small companies, not the big companies, that are really drive a lot of the mass customization to date. Categories include food, apparel and shoes, home decor, smartphone cases and media (such as Pandora).
Stay tuned for my next blog post on the recommendations Forrester gives to companies that are considering mass customization as a product strategy.
Evan Saks from create-a-mattress suggested a collaboration on the LinkedIn Group Mass Customization, Personalization and Co-Creation. Many mass customization companies already joined. If you have a design-your-own website, click the link and join in!
Mass Customization is an academic term, attributed to Stan Davis in his book “Future Perfect” where he writes about “mass customization, the production and distribution of customized goods and services on a mass basis.”
The term is often mentioned in connection with manufacturing and change management: After “Future Perfect” and then soon Prof. Pine’s book “Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition” big companies began considering customized versions of their existing products. The conversation turned to making mass production lines flexible, and creating a system that allows interaction between producer and customer.
Keep in mind that this was in the 90s! The internet had just hatched, social media still 20 years or so away. Manufacturing had just discovered Kanban and Just-In-Time production 10 years ago- mass customization required on demand production! I’m not saying that mass customization was completely impossible for the companies of that time - but it definitely proved to be a tough cookie.
So people thought of mass customization as a big promise - that didn’t end up coming true. A “nice idea”, but still an “oxymoron”. Today, mass customization is still associated with that chasm between theory and reality, despite reality being much closer to theory than ever before- leaving us “mass customizers” looking for a new term, and the rest of the world in confusion about all this terminology floating around.
Given the disappointment with the idea and the confusing about terminology, it might not be surprising that the term mass customization has been stretched tremendously. The biggest leaps in interpretation I’ve heard all relate to the customization of services - and if you think about it, of course a haircut at the hairdresser is “customized” to your head shape (thankfully), and yes, they do cut a lot of hair there - but can this really be mass customization? I think not. The term has also been used to describe rental bikes in cities (“customization of mass transportation”) and ATM’s (customization of service since you can tell it how much money you want out of it).
Personally, as much as I like getting a hair cut made for my head, the right amount of money, I think it doesn’t help to define a term like mass customization so loosely. My definition is more something like this: “Making customized goods on-demand with the efficiency of mass production.”. And yes, that term is still looking at the topic from a production point of you - so stay tuned for my other terms to get the custom[er] angle.
“Design Your Own” and “Create Your Own” are just a manifestation of mass customization - more about that in a later blog post.
Further Reading:
Term Wars: Personalization vs. Mass Customization by Prof. Piller
“Thanks to the Web and manufacturing technology, consumers can now customize virtually anything — from dress shirts to cereal. A look at the innovative startups that are quite literally giving the people what they want.”
“It’s obvious that customization can be a successful business model, one that’s often easier to launch. So why are we just seeing a surge now? It might have something to do with “the me generation.”“
I realize there’s been a lot of confusion about terms like “mass customization” vs. “co-creation”, “open innovation”, even “crowdsourcing”. Not only has there been some expansion of boundaries of these terms beyond what I would think is useful, but also are definitions subjective, and different people mean different things when they use these terms. I’ve decided to give you my definitions in a few upcoming blog posts, starting with Mass Customization.
Other definitions:
I’ve quoted Pine and Gilmore in my blog post “Mass Customization as a Revolution in Production?” before on this: “…as new mass-produced items rolled off the lines, most consumers gladly sacrificed what they wanted exactly in order to simply obtain one.” (in the introduction of “Markets of One”)
Can we reverse that with mass customization? Can we make products available to consumers without making them sacrifice?
Yes, it’s possible. But to understand this sacrifice is crucial in determining what should be customized - and what not. As you’re devising a new mass customization business, focus your attention on that exact sacrifice. A good way to identify them is by observing “work arounds” of customers. Whenever someone takes a mass produced goods and adjusts it themselves to their own purposes, it’s an indicator that there are more out there that would prefer the adjusted item over the standard item. Not everyone might be as crafty to invent a work around. Take your friends that buy jeans and then take them to the tailor to get the hem shortened or let out. There’s customization potential.
The tricky part though is to identify what sacrifices most of the consumers make. In the case of pants, is it that it “looks ok, but not perfect?”, or the length, or the way it sits on the hip? Only market research and interaction with those customers can really give you an insight into that. Often, a personal experience is a great start, but be sure to back it up - it might be that you’re the only one making that sacrifice.
But beware of the sacrificing consumer who has gotten so used to his sacrifice that he doesn’t notice it anymore. As Pine and Gilmore write: “[E]xpectations are conditioned by years, indeed decades, of settling for something less (and sometimes something more) than what each customer wants exactly.” But as more an more companies offer mass customization, as innovators triumph over having obtained exactly what they needed, the increased value provided to consumers will become the norm, and everyone calls out “Why didn’t we think of that?”
A production that makes mass customized goods almost always requires a modularized production. Example: To make customized chocolate bars, you must define the modules, such as 4 base chocolates and 100 toppings in the case of chocri. But not only the inputs are modules, the process has to be divided into modules as well. To define those process modules correctly is imperative for a successful mass customized business. For example, at chocri different modules could have been the size of the chocolate bar, the shape of the chocolate bar, we could have offered 100 base chocolates and four toppings, or customized packagings every time. There are endless possibilities to define those modules, and they might change over time (at chocri, we introduced a fourth base chocolate after two years, which of course caused an explosion of the possible chocolate bars you can make on the website).
As Pine and Gilmore write in their introduction to Markets of One:
“Modular capabilities are much more difficult to design than integrated products. … establishing such capabilities requires some down-and-dirty dealing with various operational details of one’s business.”
I couldn’t agree more, and this particularly applies to scaling up the business. As more and more orders come in, you have to be able to deal with the complexity inherent in a module based production. Take chocri for example: The people who make our chocolate bars have to be trained to know every topping, how to put on the chocolate bar in relation to other toppings (so that it tastes and looks good). Once a new topping enters our list (e.g. our topping of the month), the production team needs to adjust, to learn vocabulary (for our international orders). When we have a theme Valentine’s Day packaging, they need to look for those orders that chose it. The more chocolate bars we make, the more people we need to make the chocolate bars, the higher the complexity in ensuring that every chocolate bar that leaves is made perfectly.
I think that the “down-and-dirty dealing with various operational details” requires you as a mass customizer to have your production in-house. Or at least that your supplier is as invested in its success as you are yourself. The added complexity in mass customization production cannot be handled by everyone, especially not by those who are used to mass production processes.
There are several ways to look at Mass Customization:
While I’m most involved with the first bullet point (mass customization as a business model), which pays more attention to the external and the consumer, I find the research in regards to production fascinating. As I’m reading the book Markets of One by Prof. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, I thought I’d share some points mention in its introduction that I think should be interesting to anyone involved in any facet of mass customization and that are a bit more related with the production of goods in a mass customized way.
In the science of production, mass customization is essentially another concept, and a very high level concept as that. It would be fair to say that it might be the next revolution in how goods are produced, following crafting and mass production.
Historically, the only major concept on how to produce goods was crafting. Somebody would go to the tailor and give a shirt in order. The shirt would be made right then and there by the tailor, to the measurements taken by the customer. Since everything was made on demand and specifically for a customer coming into the shop, making the shirt (or the shoes) according to the specifications and measurements of the customer wasn’t much more effort. It was normal. This production method can still be found today of course, but either they’re in countries with low labor costs (get your own shirt made in China and you’ll see), or they are extremely expensive (get your own shirt made in London and you’ll see). Amazingly enough, Robert T. McTeer Jr., the President and CEO of the Fed in Dallas summarized this before (as quoted in Markets of One):
“Things used to be made to order and made to fit. But they were labor-intensive and expensive”
Then the industrial revolution happened, and with it came machines, modern methods of transportation, and Henry Ford. Suddenly, goods were produced on assembly lines: Mass Production. Shirts and shoes were made in standardized sizes and standardized designs. It became much cheaper to produce these goods, and suddenly everyone was able to afford a pair of shoes. As Gilmore and Pine write in their introduction to Markets of One: “…as new mass-produced items rolled off the lines, most consumers gladly sacrificed what they wanted exactly in order to simply obtain one.” Amazingly enough, this standardization is even celebrated today, and it’s what brands exist for. Most consumers are influenced by what others around them have, and they want the same. Brands are “in”, and suddenly everyone needs, let’s say, an Apple product. Robert T. McTeer Jr. please:
“Mass production came along and made things more affordable, but at a cost - the cost of sameness, the cost of one-size-fits-all.”
Gilmore and Pine suggest that the computer and the internet have the same “revolutionary” effect on us today that the industrial revolution had on our predecessors. Suddenly, amazing amounts of data are available, and even better - we have the means to process them, and to translate them into actions. Everyone is connected to everyone, and since the advent of social media, it’s normal for consumers to interact with companies, as if they were a tailor on main street in the village again. Machines, no, let’s call them robots, can make things just as well as humans did in the past (maybe even better), but at a much larger scale, and in a flexible manner that was unthinkable in Ford’s times. It is finally possible to combine the low cost of mass production with the individualization of crafting. Enter: Mass Customization
“Technology is beginning to let us have it both ways. Increasingly, we’re getting more personalization at mass-production prices. We’re moving toward mass customization”
Yes, that’s Robert T. McTeer Jr. of course. At this point I have to admit that he said that in 1998 - 13 years ago! The Markets of One is from 2000. But let’s keep in mind that it took a good while for mass produced cars to become the norm as well. The first T-Model cost the equivalent of $20k modern-day-USD in 1909, and by 1920 the price had decreased to $3000 in modern-day-USD [source] As prices decreased gradually, more consumer demand was created, and more companies started offering mass produced goods. We as consumers have gotten fairly used to standardized goods, and companies have invested in complex and integrated systems that are difficult to break up. Therefore, we might have to rely on small companies to drive this “new age of production”, and startups take their time. It’s up to you, dear reader!
The December issue of the Economist has an interesting article on the disadvantages of overwhelming choice. The problem is known, but the article is extremely well researched and ties the topic very well together, so I want to summarize it here and then comment on why it’s relevant for Mass Customization.
Choices have exploded
Many of you know this very well as mass customizers, but even in the mass produced world, choices have exploded. The article mentions that an average American supermarket has five times as many items on shelves today (about 50,000) than it had in 1975 (about 50k today).
Many of these options have improved life immeasurable in the rich world…”
But: Is it too much choice?
However, research has proven many times that too much choice is demotivating. In a study in California, shoppers offered one group 24 jams to sample, another only 6. The shoppers with the larger choice ended up being less likely to buy though - only 3% of them purchased a jam, compared to 30% of those who had had only 6 jams to sample from. The same research results held up when they tried different products (interestingly enough - chocolate was one of them). There was one outlier: Germany! “German researchers, by contrast, found that shoppers were not put off by too much choice, whether of jams, chocolates or jelly beans…”.
Barry Schwartz, who really made the topic a conversation when he wrote the book “The Paradox of Choice”, says in it:
At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannise.”
The article further says that what makes choice so overwhelming is the downside: The cognitive dissonance, after the purchase, the possible regret of having chosen the wrong thing.
What does an aversion to choice mean for businesses?
The traditional answer to people’s aversion to choice are brands. Brands that are well marketed and that hence feel like a “safe choice”. Indeed, as a German I remember being surprised upon my first visit to the US how brand conscious consumers are in the US. The article sums up:
Indeed, in a wolrd that celebrates individualism and freedom, many people decide to watch, wear or listen to exactly the same things as everybody else.
But let’s look at what choice does for sales. The article has several examples:
Finally, I want to highlight the quote of a life coach in the article, who says “Young people have grown up with masses of choice.”
Implications for Mass Customization
With mass customization, choice explodes much more than a tenfold increase of items in a supermarket. Take chocri - on the website, you can create 27 billion different chocolate bars, each single bar requiring you to choose from over 100 modules. When I first joined chocri, one of my first questions was “But what about the paradox of choice?”. Now that I know more, I think there are 4 implications for mass customization businesses from the findings highlighted by the Economist article:
“It’s often said that the best startups are founded by entrepreneurs who built the product for themselves.
While that rule doesn’t always hold true, I can say it’s it generally a good thing when entrepreneurs have deep domain expertise in the space where they are innovating.” Makes me think about the success of chocri (we make the customized chocolate bars in our own facility, two floors down from our office), and the struggles I’ve heard from companies that outsourced their production to partners. Something to think about if you want to start a mass customization company!
What could be simpler than a white tank and jeans, this outfit is perfect.
Now I just have to find an excuse for the rest of the year.
Merci Κοnstantina!
RT @ThirdEye3 Oh, yes! via @helena_chari ...
h/t @andrewburnett
large custom laptop messenger bag
vinyl shine bright blue / white / bright blue
created by TB2 in Singapore, Singapore
customize this bag
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Quirky, founded by Ben Kauffman in 2008, is one of my favorite examples of mass customization and user-generated...
Birthday mini-cupcakes! From Baked by Melissa in SoHo. (Taken with instagram)
I just made and named (I love that you can) several chocolate bars on Chocri, which is an amazing custom chocolate bar company, but I just wish...
