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The Change: November 2013 Issue
Mass Customization to Niche marketing
A recent marking trend became popular these last few years: Mass-customization. Mass-customization is ”a company’s capability to develop, produce, market, and deliver goods that feature enough variety and customization that nearly everyone can get exactly what he or she wants. "(Pine II 1993; Piller and Tseng, 2010)). It can also be defined as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer's needs with near mass production efficiency" (Tseng & Jiao 2001, p. 685). Mass-customization was allowed due to the creation of Mass –production by Henri Ford; that is to say the production of a standardized product on a high frequency and at lowest cost possible.
Companies like swatch and Apple used Mass customization by colouring their products in different bright colours like on the swatch watches and the Iphone 5C. Nowadays, on the Internet it is possible to customize personally. Nike and converse created an interactive 3D website where it possible to personalize your own shoes (Nike, 2013; Converse, n.d.). The customer chooses the shoe model wanted, and then choose the colours or patterns in the range given to the customer; based on database marketing (ref article 1;(Piller and Tseng 2010)). The data collection is important in the process as if it is not well applied the product won’t sell (Pine II, 1993). This new trend allows the customer more choice than what is in the local stores. This brought up a new expectation the one a bigger choice and the ability to personalize.
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