ABSTRACT
Mass Customization, the 1992 book by management consultant B. Joseph Pine II, heralded the arrival of a new economy that is said to benefit both consumers and producers. Mass customization combines micromarketing and post-Fordist production (also known as ‘flexible specialization’), the use of a fluid workforce for small-batch production that can quickly adapt to market and consumption patterns. In order to succeed, Pine argues, companies will need to increase their product variety and shorten product life-cycles through ‘just-in-time’ production methods. According to Pine, this is necessary because ‘customers can no longer be lumped together in a huge homogeneous market, but are individuals whose individual wants and needs can be ascertained and fulfilled’ (Pine 1992: 6, 34). This, he says, is possible because of new technologies for micromarketing, like collecting databases of e-commerce activity, credit-card transactions, and purchase histories. Analysing this information (‘data mining’) allows marketers to define consumer behaviour in ever-narrower ways, hence the term ‘one-to-one’ marketing (Peppers and Rogers 1997).
