Many brands are turning to customisation to meet the increasing demands of consumers. But is customisation really what they want? Asks Steve Gibbons
Every ying has its yang. And so it is with customisation. In beauty care as with almost any other category of consumer goods and services, we’re seeing brands falling over themselves to customise their products to meet their consumers’ increasingly exacting needs. The notion of customisation for consumer goods – sometimes called mass customisation – isn’t new. It’s been talked about as the next big thing for the last two decades, without ever gaining any real traction. As far back as the 1990s it was discussed among management gurus as a trend that would fundamentally change the structure of the US economy. Well, not yet it hasn’t.
There have also been some spectacular failures. Levi Strauss invested for over a decade to offer customised jeans but for whatever reason it failed. Likewise Dell backed out of customised products saying it was far too costly to continue. And a project we were involved with for The Body Shop that allowed consumers to create their own bespoke fragrance faded after its initial success.
But there are some apparent successes out there: Nike, Converse and Adidas make great play of customising footwear from both an aesthetic and functional standpoint. But to what extent these are commercially effective or just great PR stories is harder to define. Each of these three brands is of course reliant on and enabled by digital technologies. And it could be exactly this that makes customisation more viable, both from the supply and affordability standpoint but also and far more interestingly from a consumer desire standpoint.
The interactivity enabled by digital media is certainly growing consumers’ desire for customisable products and is engendering a shift in mind set that psychologists talk about as the ‘I designed it myself effect’, where consumers feel a real sense of achievement in co-creation. However, the question to which I don’t yet have an answer is: do consumers actually really, really want customisation? And this is the ying to customisation’s yang.
Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s because I’m a bloke, but increasingly in most spheres of my life the very last thing I want is customised products with all the additional complications (and potential expense) that they bring.
In most things I frankly want less choice not more; life is already far too complicated. I suffer from an anxiety of choice when presented with an overcomplex restaurant menu. One of my best food memories is the simple fare from a pub on Dartmoor: sandwiches made from homemade bread, Cornish butter and ham carved off the bone. Just one thing on the menu, but made with the very best of ingredients. Very polarising I admit but increasingly some really successful brands repel just as much as they attract.
In beauty care we are seeing activity at both ends of the customisation-simplification continuum. The runaway success of BB creams, which started as 3-in-1s and are now being marketed as 5-in-1s, are surely a response to the need for women to have a less complex beauty regime.
And at the customisation end of the spectrum, Sephora with its collaboration with Pantone and Boots with its Match Made Service have developed technologies that scan and calibrate your skin tone to help you select exactly the right shade foundation. This is customisation but it could also be an enormous help as it effectively simplifies the selection process, not complicating it as many customisation offers do.
Taking this a step further, and this really will be a beauty revolution, is the technology developed by the Israeli company ColoRight. Following a high tech analysis of your hair’s colour and texture the system creates a personalised ready mixed colourant that matches both your hair’s current condition and your desired shade outcome, overcoming a systemic and pre-existing problem within the hair colourant category. This trend is driven as much by particular types of consumer as it is by differing need states.
There are those high interest product categories for the heavily beauty involved, for which increasing customisation will be needed and those categories where simplicity and speed of choice will be essential. With this polarisation, beauty brands will increasingly need to decide where they sit; are they the simple, ‘little thought required’, ‘I either love it or hate it’ option or do they offer a breadth of choice that allows their consumer to feel they’ve as near as possible found a customised product that exactly meets their needs? Will there be room in the middle for brands that cover neither of these need states?
If it’s not already entirely clear, I’m the type of consumer that rejects overcomplication. For me the experience of buying coffee epitomises the potential pitfalls of customisation. If you steer away from your regular cappuccino, choosing coffee has become utterly bewildering and really quite intimidating. We’ve gone from basically just filter coffee, which admittedly to modern tastes is pretty dire, to untold countless combinations of labyrinthine complexity. If the need to choose between selecting from coffee type, milk type, froth texture and depth, flavouring, hotness and topping combinations isn’t enough to drive you screaming from Starbucks, they’d only need to ask you to tell them your name to finally push you over the edge.