Applying Concepts of Mass Customization to Marketing Assets

Mass customization is the next great paradigm for any manufacturer or service provider looking to differentiate itself in a highly selective market. Based on the idea of highly efficient mass production, mass customization uses advancements in information technology to enable companies to adjust products and services to meet the individual needs of their buyers. Think Dell Computers in the 1990s, selling PCs online so that customers could choose a base model and then customize it, adding memory, hard drive and video card technology so the final product will run their applications exactly as needed. Using an online interface made it simple for Dell to gather information about the customer’s preferences and communicate it to the shop floor, so a build-to-order model was both feasible and cost-efficient.

These same concepts can be applied to marketing materials. Any company faced with multichannel marketing goals and selling in multiple regions can make excellent use of new IT tools to standardize certain aspects of campaign collateral and provide choice in others. For instance, an ad campaign might run in every state in the U.S. with a Halloween theme. In Connecticut, the primary image might show children Trick-or-Treating against a colorful backdrop of autumn leaves. In San Diego, the ad might feature revelers beach-side, drinking margaritas on a surf board.

The application of mass customization principles to the marketing function serves the same ultimate goal: To increase sales. In this case, it improves relevance of messages to end users by improving internal processes for any company that sells and markets across geographies with help from a selling channel that includes sales account managers, reseller partners, store managers and local marketing teams. The communication layer is enabled by a new kind of IT tool, called a marketing asset management (MAM) solution, that improves workflows between distributed teams, outside vendors, partners and a centralized marketing group such as corporate marketing. As internal processes improve, these teams can create better marketing materials using less time, money and resources.

The pay-back for Dell’s innovation was two-fold: greater customer satisfaction with customized products offered at a low price, and a significant reduction in inventory overhead due to a streamlined and highly responsive supply chain. Mass customization in marketing brings a whole host of associated benefits: brand compliance; collaboration that extends to distributed teams; improved knowledge of customer preferences across geographies; and the ability to incent customers to take location-specific actions.
 
A MAM solution unites the people closest to customers, like sales and store managers, with the centralized marketing group that sets the standards for how the entire organization communicates with customers, prospects and partners. It’s the best of both worlds: customized offers based on intimate knowledge of customer needs with brand-appropriate communications that support the goals and strategies of the organization’s leadership.

If you want to learn more about the potential for mass customization, either for marketing departments, manufacturers or service providers, check out an upcoming conference hosted by the Haas School of Business in San Francisco. Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation will bring together academics and business strategists from all over the world, to explore how commercial businesses might open up their internal processes and participate in knowledge transfer that could fuel innovation for economies worldwide.