Related Topics Build to Order Cycle Time Reduction Micro Marketing One-to-One Marketing Description Mass Customization is the large-scale production of personalized goods and services. To succeed at it, companies must harness technologies that revamp their speed, flexibility and efficiency at minimum expense. Combined with organizational changes to focus firms on the unique needs of very small customer segments, these technologies help companies affordably deliver custom versions of their offerings to profitable niche markets. Once considered a manufacturing and supply chain capability, Mass Customization now encompasses a company?s ability to differentiate a product or service in any way?from distinct branding to unique delivery. There are four basic modes of Mass Customization: the collaborative approach, in which businesses help customers choose the product features they need; the adaptive approach, in which companies offer a standard but adaptable product users can alter themselves; the cosmetic approach, in which only the presentation of the product, such as its packaging, is customized; and the transparent approach, which provides customers with individualized offerings without their knowledge of it. Methodology The steps necessary to successfully implement Mass Customization are: Decide how to adapt Mass Customization principles to the business?s unique customer needs and system economics; Design product and service options that create enough customer value to justify customization expenses; Develop modular components that can be combined late in the manufacturing and delivery process to create a wide array of end products and services; Build manufacturing systems that can produce families of products while simultaneously minimizing setup and change-over times; Reduce the time to market across the entire chain of activities that produce the custom goods and services. Common Uses Companies use Mass Customization to: Reach ever-smaller market segments, even niches containing as few as one customer; Drive down the higher costs associated with addressing differentiated markets by creating greater economies of scale at smaller volumes along the supply chain; Respond to fast-changing markets in order to simultaneously preserve customer loyalty and protect profit margins. Related Bain capabilities Customer management Revenue Enhancement Service operations Selected References Feitzinger, Edward, and Hau L. Lee. ?Mass Customization at Hewlett-Packard: The Power of Postponement.? Harvard Business Review, January/February 1997, pp. 116-121. Gilmore, James H., and B. Joseph Pine II. ?The Four Faces of Mass Customization.? Harvard Business Review, January/February 1997, pp. 91-101. Gilmore, James H., and B. Joseph Pine II. Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value Through Mass Customization. Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Pine, B. Joseph, II. Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. Harvard Business School Press, 1993. Pine, B. Joseph, II, Bart Victor and Andrew C. Boynton. ?Making Mass Customization Work.? Harvard Business Review, September/October 1993, pp. 108-119. Swaminathan, Jayashankar M. ?Enabling Customization Through Standardized Operations.? California Management Review, Spring 2001, pp. 125-135. Wentz, Thomas K., and Sally Francis. Transformational Change: How to Transform Mass Production Thinking to Meet the Challenge of Mass Customization. Corporate Performance Systems, Inc., 1999. Zipkin, Paul. ?The Limits of Mass Customization.? Sloan Management Review , Spring 2001, pp. 81-87.