Customization News – Week Ending 11-21

Warcraft Offers Character Customization

An expansion pack for World of Warcraft was released this week offering a host of new features including the ability to customize your avatar. WOW allows you to design your character, with many limits, at the beginning of the game, but up til know you couldn’t customize it after playing for a while. Blizzard’s Paul Sams and Lee Sparks explain the reason’s behind their decision to offer customization:

“When you create your character, often times you wish you’d done things differently. You wish you were on a different realm, you wish you’d had a different name or you wish you’d chosen a different look and feel to your character.”

Companies that offer an ongoing experience with a customized service should build in features that account for their customers learning and growing sophistication.

Neutrogena SkiniD – Customized Cosmetics

Neutrogena is launching a new product offering called SkiniD to compete with Proactiv Solution. Skin iD’s point of differentiation is being a customized solution consisting of lotions and creams to fit a customer’s unique profile. This is probably the biggest mass customization initiative since NIKEiD launched a decade ago. It will be interesting to see how it fares, especially in lieu of P&G’s failed experiment in beauty market, Reflect. It seems like Neutrogena learned from P&G’s mistakes and spent time considering the human element, crafting an interface that helps customer navigate the product options. As Joseph Pine said in one of his books on mass customization “Fundamentally, customers don’t want choice. They just want exactly what they want. Your job is to help them figure out what it is they want, because often they don’t know or can’t articulate it.”

Customized Quilt Kits

StitchSimple offers a novel approach to customization. Using their customization interface you design a quilt using a preset template, filling in the fabrics from their library. They send the selected cloth, pre-cut to shape, and leave assembly to the customers. Pricing starts around $80. This is a great way to keep costs down on what is a very labor intensive product category. It also plays into the mindset of crafters who take on these projects to display their skills and build self-esteem.

Face Scanner

TechCrunch featured a company “Thats My Face” that is making it possible to create 3D models of faces using 2 photographs and a 3D printer, and $2000. The video explains how it works and it is safe to say a ZCorp printer produced the finished good. In the same week another company claims to have patented a similar technology.

The Harvard Business Publishing blog has an article on three factors that are hurting the retail environment in the US. Companies that integrate a customization option are able to address all of these:

1. Inability to reach/motivate customers – HBP says ” One factor is advertising’s having lost its power to spur demand. It’s become too splintered, too pervasive, and too easy to ignore.”

Companies that offer customization still need to attract customers, but once there retailers can offer increased motivation in the form of pride of creation.

2. Saturation - “Especially in light of the steady shift of shopping to online vendors, the nation simply has more sales outlets than it needs.”

Too many stores isn’t the major issue it is the switch from bricks to clicks. Many retail environments add little value except for the ability to touch, feel, and try products. If retailers started adding interactivity and value to the experience customers could be won back.

3. Peer to Peer Commerce – “It’s now much easier to engage in peer-to-peer commerce… supply and demand are sufficiently aggregated to serve the needs of both buyers and sellers. Shoppers can buy with greater confidence, and sellers can fetch a true market price.”

Companies like eBay, Etsy, and Ponoko are driving this trend, but nothing is stopping retailers from offering custom solutions powered by the contributions of their customers. There will always be a market for thrift goods, but P2P selling doesn’t have to be the sole dominion of the web.

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Tagged as: 3D Scanning, cosmetics, Games, Harvard Business, Quilt, Retail, Video game, Web Meets World, World of Warcraft