Mass Customization

Last week I had been speaking with Adrianto about his raincoat business and I decided to team up with him for this class.  As a student in the Master’s of Product Development program, thinking about how to design a raincoat for motorcycle drivers in Jakarta seemed like a good opportunity to apply some of the product development skills I have been learning.  Thinking about the marketplace for this product with Adrianto we started looking at what product already exist.  As you might expect much of what we saw was standard raingear such as ponchos, two piece plastic/rubber like rain suites, and various plastic bag like accessories to wrap up your feet.  All of these products are rather generic and for each of them I had trouble identifying an application that I thought they would be perfect for, let alone the application of using them on a motorcycle.  Simply put it seems like the manufacturers of these products lumped all consumers into one mass market without considering the specific needs of any given segment. 

Recently I read an excerpt from Creating Breakthrough Products titled ‘The Era of Customer Value, Mass Customization, and the Global Economy’ which made the observation that today consumers no longer behave in large predictable groups like they may have in the post WWII era of mass marketing.  The authors of Creating Breakthrough Products attribute this shift in consumer behavior to the fact that we are now in the era of information which has created segmented markets through numerous new media channels which provides people the ability to research and buy products in a way they never thought possible.  On one hand I think this is really exciting because it creates new opportunities for the invention of new products that can be designed to serve very specific markets, such as a raincoat for motorcycle riders in Jakarta.  On the other hand I think this trend potentially complicates business decisions because it changes the dynamic of product development.  Where previously a manufacturer’s philosophy may have been to develop generic products at low cost for a mass market now manufacturers must think about developing specialized products at higher costs for a very specific (often smaller) target market.  Is the latter approach one that can be as profitable as the former approach?  Maybe not but in today’s changing marketplace it may be the only way to carve out a profit.