The success of Dell Computers with mass customisation of personal computers has caught the attention of manufacturers in other industries looking for new ways to reduce inventory costs and offer customised products.
But some studies show that this enthusiasm might be unrealistic. Only a few products have attributes suitable for mass-customisation at low cost. To offer customised products, an industry must have certain capabilities:
Sceptics suggest the novelty of mass customisation will decline and then only attributes on which consumer preferences vary a lot, like clothes and sports equipment, will be marketed as customised products.
For other products or attributes, the best option might be to use technology and creativity to make them configurable, so they will adapt to different preferences and/or sizes. This is the better option for car seats, for example, where customisation has disadvantages given that a car are is used by more than one person over its useful life.
Source: Is Mass Customization Feasible? Economic Intuition, Summer 2001; based on Mani Agraval, T.V. Kumaresh and Glenn A. Mercer, The False Promise of Mass Customization, McKinsey Quarterly, 2001, No.3, and Paul Zipkin, The limits of Mass Customization, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2001.
For more Economic Intuition research summaries http://www.economicintuition.com
For more on Technology and Productivity http://www.ncpa.org/iss/eco/
FMF Policy Bulletins 30 April 2002
