For most of the twentieth century, manufacturers dictated how the average American consumer lived. The consumption-driven lifestyle model was introduced in the early 1900s and widely popularized in a post-World War II America that sought stability and uniformity in all aspects of life. Products were created for the masses homogeneously and with little regard for personal tastes, needs, or niche markets. This approach to manufacturing, business, and capitalism worked—and very well too, creating lots of eager and profitable consumers.
Over the past few years a new paradigm has emerged as we leave the age of mass manufacturing behind and enter one of mass customization and what is now today known as “the long tail.” Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, has written on the topic in regard to the entertainment and music industry, “ this is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).”
Though Long Tail economics and the observations of journalists like Chris Anderson and BusinessWeek’s innovation editor Bruce Nussbaum is new, the concept of mass customization is not. The IBM Advanced Business Institute’s Joseph Pine wrote about this “new frontier in business competition for both manufacturing and service industries” sixteen years ago in Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competitions. In his book, which has not been checked out of Brown University’s Rockefeller library since 1996, Pine argues that the standard view of American industry based on volume of production is no longer relevant in the modern era and that our nation needs to adapt our practices and innovate rather than trying to continue to compete with recently industrialized nations that trump our production capabilities. Even though Pine wrote his book before the rise of the internet and the true revolution of the information age, his views are contemporary and relevant, offering us a potential solution to the predicaments of our underperforming or failing manufacturing and information industries.
Pine positions mass customization as a hybrid between artisan production (or craft) and mass production introduced to new appliances that reflect the concept of mass customization,– that originated in the mid-twentieth century as more educated and specific consumer markets emerged. Starting after World War II, when Japan assimilated Western practices of mass production and created a sleeker, more efficient model than the U.S., American industry tried and failed to emulate their model to adapt to the new rules and a shifting consumer base. This led to much of our nation’s present financial crisis and the crumbling of former pillars of the American economy like our automotive industry. Rather than leading through innovation, American industry stagnated through the 1980s and 90s. Around this time mass customization became a potential solution to the problem of foreign competition, not only for manufacturing, but also for the spectrum of American industry, from information architecture to how consumers interact within the marketplace. As Pine points out, America’s success has always emerged from our ability to innovate and promote creative thinking, not in the sheer mass of our production or ability to adopt another culture’s practices like China and Japan. We are a nation of abstract thinkers; our educational institutions are the best in the world. Wouldn’t a movement away from twentieth-century industries create a new American system that would again set the standard for the developed world and promote the U.S. as a problem-solver and leader in the world community?
But what was this movement toward? Micromarketing, leaner production techniques, and shorter product/service life cycles offer a system that will organically evolve not based on the principles of industry executives but rather the will and direction of the public. Pine breaks down four types of early mass customization. Collaborative customization involves a firm and an individual customer collaboratively determining the precise product offering that best serves the customer’s needs, such as a clothing company selling jeans to fit an individual customer. Adaptive customization engages customization on the user-end, producing a standardized product that the customer customizes, such as an adjustable office chair. Transparent customization provides customers with unique products tailor-made to a customer’s needs on a production level. Finally the last type of customization Pine outlines in the concept of cosmetic customization, the production of standard products marketed to customers in different ways, is the final example.
Pine’s view of customization is largely product-based, and his analysis of markets and consumers is as relevant as ever as industry continues to customize commodities and products. But over the past five years or so, with the advent of more sophisticated internet marketing technologies, product customization given way to ever-expanding information customization. Most of our online content is edited and customized based on our own personal edits or statistical information collected through the Internet. The mass customization of information and software has redefined entire industries, from advertising and shopping to entertainment and music. Industry is continually attempting to understand how to best use this rapid interconnectedness to attract new customers and retain old ones.
Pine noted in 1992 that we had entered an age of heightened market competitiveness over smaller and more fickle consumer groups. The Internet has only magnified this competitiveness since Pine wrote his book, as so many products are now sold directly to consumers by companies throughout the world. In response, business has linked marketing to new practices of social networking and interconnectedness in the customization of their products and information. An early foray into this realm of product and innovation customization was Budweiser’s Bud.tv, long-form Bud Light commercials that attempted to connect the brand’s “true-believers” by offering appealing content they would associate positively with their products. Bud.tv has some successes though it eventually folded as consumers demanded more control over their experience and gravitated toward organic, customized content rather than flashy, big budget campaigns.
Perhaps the most impressive example of consumers dictating their own experience in the ever more democratized marketplace came just a few months ago when Tropicana released a total overhaul in their packaging, a redesign that was rejected by the public, who flooded Twitter and Facebook with complaints and actually moved PepsiCo, Tropicana’s parent company, to revert back to the old packaging.
This is an important parable for how dynamic consumer behavior and interaction with industry can affect massive brand and product production change. However, this leads us to examine the issue a little more carefully. While taking back your Tropicana may seem like and empowering move, there is a downside to customizing our “experience”: we have also begun to fall into a trap of living within an entirely edited reality. As we all know, these days we subscribe to our favorite blog’s RSS feeds, create our own front page for the newspaper (online, mind you), program iTunes to tell us what music we want to listen to, and fast forward through pundits who don’t share our views or advertisements for products we think we don’t want. Such customization of our existence around our preexisting perspectives presents a scary prospect as a society. Esquire Magazine’s culture writer Chuck Klosterman set forth a parodic history of the 21st century for Esquire’s 75th anniversary issue in which he described the idea of “news blow” (as a means of inhaling information) that “renders the user incapable of relating to any person not engaged with an identical strain of the substance.” Though his view is somewhat sensationalized (he also mentions the 2028 Presidential election between “Tom Brady (R-Michigan) and Will Smith (D-California)”) it is a relevant commentary. If we continue to exist in a culture where we are only exposed to what we want to see, taste, and hear and can buffer all other “interference,” how do we change and retain our humanity? And if we continue to be grouped by industry based on our past purchases, clicks, or other decisions, how do we truly discover anything new?
In the new globalized world we are going to be presented with unlimited options for creating our own reality through the paradigm of mass information customization. As more of our existence is housed online, marketers and businesses will have even greater resources and opportunities to reach out to us and connect us to their products or services as “individuals,” (think of the advertisements in Minority Report). We need to ask ourselves whether this is an appropriate trade off. In the specific terms of visual communication and graphic design, it becomes a people based on an individual’s limited perspective or context. If we do become a society of isolated groups of consumers, politicos, and learners with provincial perspectives of the world, what is the good of all of this interconnectedness? All we are doing is redefining national and cultural boundaries in a virtual context. Customization culture was a necessary shift away from the antiquated manufacturing techniques of the twentieth century. It offers the consumer a product or service that better suits their particular needs creating a more successful interaction between the consumer and business. I am afraid, however, that even Joseph Pine, just sixteen years ago, had no idea of where we would take this scripted “individualization” or where we will take it even farther in the future. We think we consumers have power, but more than ever we exist in realities constructed by the networks and institutions we live in. This scenario can only dilute human discovery and narrow our point of view by offering us pre-sorted goods and services catering to our “tastes.”
We need to ask ourselves whether this is an appropriate trade off not only in our own lives, but as graphic designers. Is it our responsibility to promote interaction between all members of society and not to compartmentalize people based on an individual’s limited perspective or context? If we do become a society of isolated groups of consumers, politicos, and learners with provincial perspectives of the world, what is the good of all of this interconnectedness? All we are doing is redefining national and cultural boundaries in a virtual context. Since it is clear that society seems to be headstrong on this track, graphic designers and the media must continue to be more responsible and accountable for maintaining an appropriate balance between filtering and customization to articulate messages with openness and concern for humanity.