Mass Customization And Mass Personalization

Since the earliest artisans offered items for sale, price and customization have been two important product characteristics to the consumer. So is it today, but with a few twists. Breakthrough came when the French military used interchangeable parts for cannons and muskets at the end of the 18th century, By the middle of the 19th century, many more products were being made from interchangeable parts. This paradigm shift caused consumers to become comfortable with buying standard products that were cheaper and easier to repair. Mass production became dominant since it enabled complex products like automobiles to be made cheaply enough that average people could afford them. The general trend of standard designs competing on price and customized

2, mass personalization is different from personalization which can be dated back to craft production. Contrast to the products at that time with an excessively high price tag, mass personalization provides personalized products with affordable fulfillment cost for both customers and producers. Mass personalization brings more values to both customers and producers. For customers, they can be provided with products with less lead time and high quality. Additionally, customers feel they are treated distinctively by the firm. For producers, they can gain differentiation by providing personalized products[19]. Though craft production can enable personalization to the extent of market of one, the cost of production is relatively high. In the paradigm of mass production, there is no involvement of customers because products are standardized by designers. For mass customization, it exhibits a process of customers’ making choices passively from standard offerings, where customers are led by designers with limited participation. Based on these choices, firms can then gear up supply chains and production process to fulfill the orders with little or even no customer participation. However, in the paradigm of mass personalization, customers are intensively integrated into the production process. It is obvious that active customer participation is a crucial factor to satisfy user experience related requirements, since experience is influenced by a chain of human cognitive activities. Thus, active customer participation is an important driving force for the whole production process, which affects the final product offering directly in personalization. Based on the discussion above, it can be seen that mass personalization is the advanced stage of mass customization. Mass personalization addresses market of one, which is the extreme case of mass customization. Compared with the limited customer involvement in mass customization, customers need to be