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The Change: November 2013 Issue
By buying from the brands the customer can personalize and declare their lifestyle. Mini and Citroën understood this need to create a lifestyle and so created customizable inside out cars like the Mini Cooper or the DS3 (Citroën, n.d. ; Mini, n.d.). The more customised is the car the more the price rises, this shows the wealth of the customer but also his personal tastes to the society. This generation of customers wishes to affirm themselves by declaring their differences on one same product. This allows the person not only to individualize themselves towards the company as seen before but also be more personnel about the object and by adding personal value to the object, to declare their nature, to differentiate themselves from the from the crowd. Nowadays the customer wants be seen as an individual in the society, an individual which affirms himself with his style on one basic that is given by Mass-customization (Franke, 2007).
The next step for this marketing trend would be customized marketing specially for niches as big groups like the homosexual or the minorities of a country want to be able to affirms their existence their specificity, personality trough the products they buy. Morgan, the car manufacturer, creates every one of his models and customises it to the wish of the customer. This car is not any car it is an old style car, which will only attract the most devoted old car lover. Here Morgan targets the old car lovers, which have the amount of money required to buy the car. This strategy could be applied to any niche segment targeted as it is customisable it can appeal to anybody taste from that specific market. This strategy can really work has it does not depend on fashion trends but on customers of the niche in particular.
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