Mass-customized Products Research Articles

Synergic Effects of Sales-Configurator Capabilities on ConsumerPerceived Benefits of Mass-Customized Products

Synergic Effects of Sales-Configurator Capabilities on ConsumerPerceived Benefits of Mass-Customized Products

Enhancing the consumer-perceived benefits of a mass-customized product through its online sales configurator

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on online sales configurators (SCs), also known as mass-customization toolkits, which enable consumers to self-customize their product solutions online. The paper aims to provide new insights into which characteristics of an online SC increase the consumer-perceived benefits of possessing a mass-customized product.Design/methodology/approachPrevious studies on mass customization (MC), sales configuration, and learning psychology are used to develop the research hypotheses, which are tested by analyzing data from 675 configuration experiences from a convenience sample of potential consumers using 31 real online SCs for laptops/notebooks, economy cars, and sport shoes/sneakers.FindingsThe paper finds support for the hypotheses that SCs with higher flexible-navigation, focused-navigation, and easy-comparison capabilities enhance not only the traditionally considered utilitarian benefit (UT), but also the consumer-perceived uniqueness benefit (UN) and self-expressiveness (SE) benefit (SE). Furthermore, consistent with the study’s hypotheses, SCs with higher benefit-cost communication and user-friendly product-space description capabilities are found to improve UT. The hypotheses that these two capabilities enhance UN and SE, however, are not supported. Post-hoc analyses suggest that the examined SCs are generally UT-centered and need improvement of their ability to communicate the UN and the SE a consumer could derive from the purchase of his/her configured product.Originality/valueWhile prior research has primarily been concerned with conceptually arguing and empirically showing that uniqueness and self-expressiveness are two additional sources of consumer value in business-to-consumer MC, this is the first empirical study that offers insights into which characteristics online SCs should have in order to draw from these two value sources.

A multi-population co-evolutionary genetic programming approach for optimal mass customisation production

Development of mass customised products demands various activities in the product development process, such as design, manufacturing process planning, manufacturing resource planning and maintenance process planning, to be considered and coordinated. In this research, a multi-population co-evolutionary genetic programming (MCGP) approach is introduced to identify the optimal design and its downstream product life cycle activities for developing mass customised product considering these different product life cycle activities and their relationships. In this research, two types of relationships between downstream product life cycle activities are considered: sequential relationships and concurrent relationships. The product design and its downstream life cycle descriptions are modelled by a multi-level graph data structure. These product life cycle descriptions are defined at two different levels: generic level for modelling the descriptions in a product family and specific level for modelling the descriptions of a customised product. The optimal design and its downstream life cycle activities are identified through the MCGP approach based on evaluations in different product life cycle aspects. Various methods have been developed to improve computation efficiency for the MCGP. Industrial case studies and comparative case studies have been implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach.

New technologies for customizing products for people with special necessities: project FASHION-ABLE

Mass-customization of wearable products are offered as a higher added value to the broad public and have to compete with ready-to-wear offer. However, people with specific requirements are not covered by the current mass-customised products. This is the case of the elderly, disabled, diabetic and obese population groups when wearing textiles, clothing, footwear and textile-based orthotic goods. Further, at present, available knowledge and flexibility of production equipment and machinery of small and medium-sized enterprises operating in these traditional industries (even those that already offer made-to-measure products to the mass public) is unable to respond to the individual needs among such heterogeneous groups. The FASHION-ABLE project has solved this problem with a comprehensive set of solutions.

Research on Collaborative Design Method for Apparel Mass Customization in the Internet Plus Era

The growing accessibility of internet service, especially in the Internet Plus era, supported mass customization in the apparel industry. As mass customization emphasize on providing individually-designed products and services to meet every customer requirement, the advanced Internet-based service systems help achieve high process flexibility and integration. In this paper, we studied the triangle relations among consumer, brands’ designer, and manufacturer in collaborative design process in apparel mass-customized product development. As well as explained the advanced technologies enabling collaborative design process, such as toolkits for co-design, 3D body scanning, and CAD systems. We finally gave three feasible recommendations for apparel industry to apply mass customization strategy.

The Influence of Trait and State Narcissism on the Uniqueness of Mass-Customized Products

Mass customization systems provide consumers with the opportunity to create unique self-designed products. To retailers and manufacturers, the segment of customers configuring unique products is of considerable interest given their potential impact on product diffusion and profits. Yet field evidence suggests that only a minority of consumers use the full potential of such systems by configuring products with unique options (e.g., a volcano red car instead of a white one). The present research shows that the uniqueness of mass-customized products depends on consumer narcissism. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) consumers higher in trait narcissism configure more unique products (while controlling for self-esteem and need for uniqueness) and (b) state narcissism can be primed via marketing communications to influence product uniqueness. Our findings suggest that firms should consider customers’ innate narcissistic tendencies, as well as the ability to influence their current states of mind, to exploit the largely untapped individualization potential of mass customization systems.

THE EFFECTS OF E-MASS CUSTOMIZATION OF LUXURY BRAND: PERCEIVED VALUE, SATISFACTION, AND LOYALTY

Mass customization refers to a strategy whereby online retailers provide individually tailored products and services to their customers and has been implemented by many retailers with the Internet technology. Many luxury brands such as Bottega Venetta, Louis Vuitton, and Salvatore Ferragamo, provide customization programs to better serve their customers, from engraving their initials on a product to creating a new design of a product. However, the expansion of the customization program to the luxury brands raises potential risk, such as loosening the brand identity and inability to satisfy customers. Despite high interests in mass customization programs and popularity of luxury brands, the effect of mass customization in luxury brands has not been explored. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study attempts to investigate how customized products of luxury brands influence perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty. In addition, this study explores how consumers’ past loyalty toward a luxury brand influences perceived value of the customization.Hypotheses of the study were (1) Perceived value of a mass-customized product has a positive influence on satisfaction with product customization; (2) Satisfaction with product customization has a positive influence on brand loyalty; (3) The influences of perceived value of a mass-customized product on satisfaction and brand loyalty are different as a function of a customer’s past loyalty; (4) The influences of perceived value of a mass-customized product on satisfaction and brand loyalty are different as a function of a customer’s need for uniqueness.The research strategy of this study was survey methodology and the sample of the study was online shopping consumers. Online questionnaires were collected by an online survey firm. After visiting ‘BURBERRY BESPOKE’, a mass-customization program of a luxury brand, survey participants were asked to answer the questionnaire. The instrument tapped perceived value of a mass-customized product, satisfaction with product customization, past/future brand loyalty, and need for uniqueness.A total of 304 female online shoppers participated in the survey. The result of structural equation modeling found the positive effects of hedonic value and utilitarian value on satisfaction with product customization and the positive effect of the satisfaction on brand loyalty. The result of multiple group comparison analyses revealed the moderating roles of past loyalty and need for uniqueness in influencing the effects of perceived value of a mass-customized product on satisfaction. These findings of the study contribute to the literature in luxury brand retailing fields and suggested managerial implications to luxury brand retailers.

Increasing the consumer-perceived benefits of a mass-customization experience through sales-configurator capabilities

The consumer's experience of self-customizing a product with a sales configurator can be a source of experience-related benefits for the consumer, above and beyond the traditionally considered utility of possessing a product that better fits his/her idiosyncratic needs. Although such experience-related benefits have been found by previous studies as increasing consumers’ willingness to pay for mass-customized products, research on what characteristics sales configurators should have to increase such benefits is still in its infancy. In this paper, we argue that two such benefits (i.e., hedonic and creative-achievement benefits) increase as a sales configurator deploys, to a greater extent, the following capabilities: focused navigation, flexible navigation, user-friendly product space description, easy comparison and benefit-cost communication. Subsequently, by analyzing 675 self-customization experiences made by 75 engineering students on 30 real Web-based configurators of consumer goods, we find empirical support for all the hypothesized relationships. We conclude discussing the contribution of the study to relevant debates, its managerial implications as well as its limitations and the related opportunities for further research.

A Modeling Approach towards an Extended Product Data Model for Sustainable Mass-Customized Products

This paper presents an extension of a generic Product Data Model (PDM) to Mass-Customization (MC) and Sustainability (S) paradigms with the aim to fulfill the requirements to support a Sustainable Mass-Customized (S-MC) product design process. The extended PDM (ePDM) is focused on a product's Bill of Materials (BOM), which gathers the main information related to a product and its specifications in terms of its design and manufacturing processes. Therefore, the ePDM developed and presented in this research work is capable to provide either product components/parts, product sustainability and product mass-customization related information in order to support the design of S-MC products.

A Market-Based Design Strategy for a Universal Product Family

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers’ specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design methods for users with some disability—often called universal design (UD). Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products serving distinct market segments to be developed from a common platform. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing and evaluating a universal product family within uncertain market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where product family platform configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform and customers’ preferences. A coalitional game is employed to evaluate which design strategies provide more benefit when included in the platform based on the marginal profit contribution of each strategy. To demonstrate an implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of light-duty trucks.

An approach for capturing the Voice of the Customer based on Virtual Prototyping

The need for companies to improve their competitiveness may lead to innovation and the reconceptualization of traditional products and processes, with companies making an effort to enhance product elements related to functionality, attractiveness, technology and sustainability, and implementing mass-customisation concepts. Mass-customised products are developed to satisfy specific customer needs, in line with increasing demand for product variety and customisation. The analysis of what customers really want, capturing the Voice of the Customer (VOC), is one of the strategies used to establish effective product development processes. Using a VOC survey, it is possible to transform customer needs into the functional and psychological requirements of the product. This paper presents a methodology based on Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to support the capturing of the VOC in regard to the visual, haptic and auditory characteristics of products. This method can be applied to the beginning of the product development process, to allow companies to deduce from the data the requirements of new industrial customised products. A flexible and interactive Virtual Prototype (VP) of a product category is then developed as a product platform in a draft version by designers and configured according to customer needs, using an immersive VR environment. This method, based on the use of VP, reduces the number of physical prototypes that need to be manufactured during the product development process, thus reducing overall costs. In addition, the VP based method supports the mass-customisation process of products through the real-time integration and collection of data for product configuration preferences, involving as many users as possible representative of the target users of the new products. To demonstrate this process a case study concerning the development of the VP for a washing machine, a summary of test sessions with users and results are presented. Specifically, the results presented in this paper are related to improvements in capturing the VOC and reductions in Virtual Prototyping cost and time.

Methods and tools that support a fast and efficient design-to-order process for parameterized product families

For many companies, mass-customized products have become the de facto standard products. For these companies, “non-standard” or “customized” means products that even the most sophisticated of product or process configuration tools for parameterized product families cannot define in advance. Products like this need a design-to-order production environment (DTO). This paper starts by presenting industrial examples that need the quickest and most efficient engineering process before releasing the customized manufacturing order. It then goes on to examine the organizational requirements, methods and tools that support a fast and efficient DTO process that comes close to the needs of mass customization.

Mass Customization's Missing Link

This article focuses on the missing link in mass customization. Mass customization has not really caught on yet because of a missing link—knowing how to actually design and build mass-customized products. The solution is concurrently engineering product families and flexible processes so any product variation within a family can be built on-demand using common parts that are always available. Accomplishing this requires some new and different strategies: production strategy, supply chain strategy, design strategy, and marketing strategy. The production strategy aims to build any variation in a product family on demand economically, which requires versatile flexible processes without expensive setup charges or delays. Supply chain strategy assures that all parts, modules, and materials must be always nearby and spontaneously resupplied by using some specific techniques. Design strategy concurrently engineers the design of the product families and their flexible processes to build customized products on-demand from common parts and materials. Marketing strategy identifies product families that have a need for mass-customized products and can be economically built on demand.

Toward Mass Customized Product Deployment in E-Commerce: The Modularization Function and Postponement Strategy

Strategically deploying customized products in an e-commerce environment not only helps businesses respond with greater agility to customer needs and strengthen their market position, but also helps businesses gain competitive edge and increase profitability. Underlying successful mass customization within the digital marketplace, a firm needs a methodology for striking a balance between the degree of customization and product pricing and delivery time—a critical supply chain issue. Providing either too much or too little customization can negatively impact both the business and the customer. This study introduces a decision-making method for product customization. This method takes into account the level of customization, production costs, and the product delivery time and applies the concept of postponement strategy to the product supply chain to boost overall supply chain effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Bicycle customization is used as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of the new approach to determine the optimal level of customization in product deployment.

Selecting the best clustering variables for grouping mass-customized products involving workers' learning

Clustering of product models is an important technique in highly customized production environments, where variety is a key competitive dimension. When the goal is to create product platforms, models are usually grouped based on parts similarity in terms of morphology and demand, and integer programming has been typically used for that. However, product groupings that yield efficient platforms not necessarily optimize the operation of manual assembly lines used to produce them. In this paper, the goal is to cluster product models with similar processing needs into families, such that an efficiency of production programming and resources allocation are maximized when products are obtained though manual assembly operations. It is known that clustering results are highly dependent on the proper choice of clustering variables. To address that problem, we propose a method to select the best clustering variables aimed at grouping customized product models into families. Two groups of clustering variables are considered: those generated by an expert assessment on product features that may impact on productivity, and those representing workers' learning rate, obtained through the learning curve modeling. The method integrates the “leave one variable out at a time” elimination procedure with a k-means clustering technique. When applied to a shoe manufacturing process, the proposed method uses only 2 out of 12 candidate variables and increases the grouping quality, measured by the Silhouette Index, to 0.89 from 0.40.

Adoption of Mass-Customized Newspapers: An Augmented Technology Acceptance Perspective

The authors propose an augmented version of the Technology Acceptance Model to examine the consumer acceptance of mass-customized (MC) newspapers. Model findings (n = 2,114) suggest that the customer's willingness to invest effort for MC products is one of the main factors driving adoption. Furthermore, gender is found to moderate the relation between base category satisfaction (with the base category “newspaper”) and perceived usefulness of an individually printed daily newspaper.

Developing Competitive Price and Production Postponement Strategies

This paper focuses on duopolistic competition under price and production postponement for two differentiable products that share component commonality. Both price and production postponement are benchmarked in order to investigate the component commonality effect on profit and also their appropriateness in different competition situations. The results show that production postponement is appropriate in situations of market expansion, price postponement to meet customer wants, and integrated price and production postponement for highly customized products. Price and production postponements offer an alternative way for managers to decide how to create products as fighting and mass-customized products. Innovative price and production postponement models represent the new contribution of this paper.

Mass-customised products: are they bought for uniqueness or to overcome problems with standard products?

Mass-customised products: are they bought for uniqueness or to overcome problems with standard products?

Understanding the Perceived Value of Mass Customization: The Distinction between Product Value and Experiential Value of Co-Design

Research on mass customization suggests that this type of offer delivers more value to the customer. However, the failures of mass-customization strategies tend to prove the contrary. This article provides answers to the following research questions: (1) Why and to what extent do consumers value mass customization? (2) How and to what extent do these sources influence total perceived value? Two components of perceived value are differentiated: (1) mass-customized product value, which is reflected in three dimensions: utilitarian, uniqueness and self-expressiveness, and (2) experiential co-design value, which is reflected in two dimensions: hedonic and creative achievement. Furthermore, our results underline the indirect impact of the experiential value of co-design on total perceived value, through mediation of mass-customized product value.

Mass Customization in the Newspaper Industry: Consumers' Attitudes Toward Individualized Media Innovations

This article applies the concept of mass customization to the newspaper industry. Although the theory of mass customization has received considerable attention in recent years, its application to the printed mass media market has been almost totally neglected. Researchers have not provided any empirical evidence of a substantial market for mass customized printed newspapers, and we do not know much about customer attitudes toward such innovations. This article contributes to research on both issues. Based on an empirical survey (n = 2,114), we examine consumer acceptance of an individualized newspaper. We address the 2 most pressing issues associated with mass-customized products. These are consumer willingness to pay a premium and consumer willingness to devote additional effort to "designing" such a newspaper. The results, based on conjoint analysis, suggest that consumers are generally willing to devote effort to customizing their news. However, only those who are well-educated and belong to the upper socioeconomic strata are willing to pay extra for individualized newspapers. When introducing mass-customized media, management should focus on these customer groups and their respective preferences.