BusinessWeek Taking Notice of Mass Personalization

I am just back from a couple of weeks vacation in Australia. It was a very relaxing time, and I was able to catch up on a lot reading while I was away. One article that caught my eye was in the SmallBiz magazine from BusinessWeek discussing how many small businesses are using the internet to mass produce custom made products.

I have written before about the personalized packaging offerings from Heinz, Kleenex and Johnnie Walker and how these companies have set up special web sites so they could personalized their products. The BusinessWeek article featured five different companies who are also using the internet to mass produce personalized products. Unfortunately the article is not available online without a paid subscription, so I won't link to it, but I can give you my commentary on the main points of the article here.

All five of the companies featured here had simple web sites that allowed their customers to easily create their own unique and personalized product. These five companies are all small, so they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a sophisticated web site. But every one of them has said that this personalized offering is now the fastest growing segment of their business.

These five companies, like Heinz, Kleenex and Johnnie Walker, recognize that we are entering into a new era. The new generation of consumers belong to what I call the "Personalization Generation". They have grown up with the internet and the personalization that is available to them online through sites like Myspace and Facebook. They like their products to reflect their own personality and the companies that cater to these consumers by offering personalization with their products will have an advantage in the coming years.

So what to do? If you are already selling your product online, it can be a relatively simple step to offer personalized packaging of some sort. Here at Lightning Labels we can leverage our digital label printing expertise and help you get started with personalized product labels. You can start off by simply collecting names in a spreadsheet and when you are ready you can move forward to implementing personalization on your web site.

Consumer products are going to become more personalized. By starting now you will ensure you have a head start on your competitors.