Abstract
A survey with more than 500 subjects is aimed to examine the desire of customers to customize different kinds of products. A trilingual questionnaire investigates the generic online buying preferences and, in detail, the personalization intention of the interviewed persons. The sample is well balanced with respect to sex and work activity, while slightly unbalanced towards the younger generations, which however represent the largest potential for a mass customization online business. The major results of the statistical analysis confirm the considerations of the previous chapters, indicating prices and availability as the main reasons for shopping online, and thus suggesting a price for customized products as close to the price of standardised products as possible. It also emphasizes the possible limit of delivery time, but shows at the same time that brand loyalty barriers can be broken in favour of personalization. While sex, being for sure a discriminating factor in Internet usage and online shopping, does not make any difference in personalisation's intention.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.internetworldstats.com, May 2010.
- 2.
χ2 15.6 with significance 0.000.
- 3.
Songlin and Mitchell (1998).
- 4.
Bardakci and Whitelock (2003).
- 5.
χ2 8.8 with significance 0.032.
- 6.
χ2 16.2 with significance 0.001.
- 7.
χ2 1.9 with significance 0.585.
- 8.
Kruskal–Wallis test for equality of distributions 16.2 with significance 0.001; Jonckheere–Terpstra test for order of distributions 41212 with significance 0.000.
- 9.
Songlin and Mitchell (1998).
- 10.
Bardakci and Whitelock (2003).
- 11.
Loginova (2010).
- 12.
Franke and Schreier (2008).
- 13.
χ2 4.4 with significance 0.041.
- 14.
χ2 8.3 with significance 0.005.
References
Bardakci A, Whitelock J (2003) Mass-customization in marketing: the consumer perspective. J Consumer Marketing 20(5):463–479
Franke N, Schreier M (2008) Product uniqueness as a driver of customer utility in mass customization. Marketing Lett 19(2):93–107
Loginova O (2010) Brand familiarity and product knowledge in customization. Int J Econ Theory 6(3):297–309
Songlin C, Mitchell MT (1998) Aligning demand and supply flexibility in custom product co-design. Eng Int J Flex Manuf Syst 19(4):596–611
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© 2011 Paolo Coletti
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Coletti, P., Aichner, T. (2011). Empirical Investigation. In: Mass Customization. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18390-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18390-4_3
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