Pick‘n’mix packs powerful proposition
Retailers: Let your customers do the building
Thursday, 1 June, 2000
Words you’ll never hear in a McDonald’s: “Ah, yeah, a Filet’o’fish, thanks — but hold the sauce.”Holding the sauce doesn’t appear in the weighty McDonald’s handbooks that ensure a Big Mac inCairo resembles the one you’d buy in Ulaanbaatar, Anchorage and New Plymouth. Sosuccessfully consistent is McDonald’s that The Economist uses the Big Mac to index worldpurchasing power.But adding extra sauce here or holding the gherkin there is proving a key driver for future retail —even for big-mother global brands. Take Starbucks, America’s fastest-growing food chain withannual growth of 30% in the past few years. The fastest-growing segment in Starbuck’s menu is,you guessed it, specialty sales.Customising the product at point-of-sale gives Starbucks an edge — even over the one-off cornercafés that you’d think would be as nimble as anything. Starbucks offers a classic “pick‘n’mix”approach, providing the basic building blocks — a range of beans, coffee styles (the same appliesfor their iced teas) — so you customise it the way you want. (Interestingly a venture into e-landproved costly for Starbucks, illustrating not even the smartest retailers have yet mastered theWeb.)By mass customising its products, Starbucks is racing with the pack. Following Nokia’sphenomenal suc-cess with its “xpress-on” mobile face plates, mobile phones are now beingmarketed by all the manu-facturers as accessories with colours, shapes and carriers to matchyour clothing. The cellphone-as-fashion-statement idea is now an industry. Fashion houses likeCalvin Klein and wetsuit manufacturer Body Glove make specialist holders. Snap-on covers arebeing offered by sites such aswww.mobileart.com.Yes, folks, mass customisation is hot and the retail end is starting to fall into two camps:customising the environment and customising the product. Probably the best example of theformer is UK liquor retailer Oddbins. It is refitting its outlets to reflect the flavour of the local area’sdemographics. Thus an up-market, plutey suburb has a different Odd-bins to the down-at-heelsuburb. Not only are the products in the fridge tailored (as most retailers do), but the differencesare expressed in shop layout, staff, colours and advertising.Customising products is more popular. Take troublewear.com, a clothing e-shop for thestreet/skate tribe. Here customers assemble colours, logos, styles to create their own garments.The Sofa Workshop in the UK and its equivalent here, The Sofa Depot, allow customers to designtheir own furniture from pre-set options before manufacture. All this can only get faster and easierfor customers as broadband Internet delivers 3D designs and body maps (for more on this, seeTechnofile).A small taste of choice at this level is making me, as a customer, impatient. Why, for instance,can’t I get a snap-on fridge cover, mix‘n’match supermarket cereal dispenser, reversible sofacovers (remember reversible raincoats — what an idea), self-assembly watch faces, a kitset bachor a downloadable library? I guess I’ll have to wait for Chelsea sugar with extra vitamins andgenetic ingredients tailored to my metabolism.Virgin in the UK intends to launch a total utility service package over the Internet. Is anyone
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