We have discussed mass customization several times in class and there have been given very good examples of companies who use mass customization.
Personalization of products and services nowadays is a very common trend that we see. Famous examples are the Nike sneakers, with your own name stitched and building your own Lego products. This trend is now also reflected in the world of food and drink. “Blends for Friends” is an example of customizing your own tea.
In Blends for Friends you can create your own personalized tea just the way you want it. Not only do you get your own favourite taste but they also look at your own personalized characteristics. Therefore they ask you to describe your hobbies and interests, nicknames, physical appearance and special anecdotes. Based on these answers they will create for you a own personalized flavour that matches exactly your personality.
Not only can you buy tea flavours but also some other accessories to complete the tea experience. In this way the company really looks at the customer wants and needs and gives you the perfect product that they can produce. A good example of mass customization.
There was an interesting blog about gamification on the blog website of Delta Lloyd. The idea is to use smartphones in order to make insurances (which is the product that Delta Lloyd sales) more interesting.
They haven’t thought of an idea yet, but they have looked at a website called statefarm.com. In this website you can see that they have built an application for the iPhone to measure your driving skills. This application gives you a score about your acceleration, breaking and cornering skills. Customers get involved and can compete against their friends in order to improve their driving skills.
If companies like Delta Lloyd can implement such apps, customers can get highly involved and the brand equity will increase. In this day and age, everybody has a smartphone and they can all use this application for the sake of fun, but also for the sake of learning.
You can find the blog here, it is written in Dutch.
There are several sites on the net that use personalized recommendations, for our mini case we discussed several sites, which included Kieskeurig.nl and Corendon.nl
Kieskeurig.nl
Kieskeurig.nl is a comparison sites that compares all kind of products that are available on the net or in real stores. It is an independent website, which means that companies can not buy a place in the ranking so that there are no companies pops up first due to a massive share they have in the website.
Customers of Kieskeurig.nl can write their own reviews about each product and give a rating to the stores and products. When buying a product, customers can choose which product they are looking for, and then decide which attributes are of importance for them. Also the reviews and rating that have been giving to customers on the site, are always double reviewd by specialists from Kieskeurig.nl. In that way Kieskeurig.nl wants to be sure that are no pointless reviews on their site.
Consumer Value Creation 