Personalization. Too close for comfort

I got asked a question the other day about hyper-mass-personalization. It seems like an interesting concept. And at first glance, with today's technologies, nothing should be simpler than implementing that.

We live in the world of instant gratification where everything seems to be just a click away. Everything is tailored to us. We can customize everything. It would lend itself to a conclusion that we should be able to customize every product for everyone.

There are a few issues which put this concept into question.

First, the practical side of things. The reason why we can afford most things around us is that they are produced en masse. It was the industrial revolution which lowered the price of things. Items which were considered luxuries became available to everyone. Think of the Model T Ford and how you could buy any color, so long as it was black.

Imagine that you are a manufacturer of jeans. Let's say it takes about 20 steps in the manufacturing process to make a pair of jeans. That goes from cutting the individual pattern pieces from the denim to the whole assembly and packing. You can achieve scale only if you are making many of them in predefined sizes.

The moment you introduce any change in the process, you introduce extra cost and room for error. Also, the cost of the pair of jeans will be 10 times higher and it will become a luxury item. Yes, there is a market for highly personalized luxury things, but then we are not talking about hyper-mass-personalization. From the Model T we are moving to a Rolls-Royce Phantom with a starting price around $500,000.

The only place where hyper-personalization can potentially happen is in the digital world. Think Google, with its search.

And this is the second thing to consider. In order to get hyper-personalized results, the system has to know everything about you. In that case, think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. In case you’ve forgotten, in the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent. This was done by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.

This is the other side of hyper-mass-personalization. The 'computer' will have to know everything. Is your argument that you only need a subset of everything? Then, you are back to the current state where marketers, with a minimum amount of information, create enough customer segmentation to deliver products to as many people as they can, with the highest profit.

Think Apple, which puts privacy at the forefront of their effort. It is still one of the most profitable companies in the world, with only a few products.

The recurrent pattern here? Learn from your customers, ask them politely what they think, deliver the product they find value in and don't spy on them. You'll be rewarded.