Here's a cool way to enhance the experience of drinking a bottled beverage. Ipifini is looking to licenses the technology to beverage companies. Plastic buttons containing flavoring, color and even scent additives are placed around the bottle. Users are able to select and press additive buttons to customize their beverage. Nice.
I think we'll see this as a trend. The 20th century was all about standardization, the 21st century will be all about user customization. Technology has developed to the point where there is no reason why products, services and experiences need to be the same for everyone. Why should my Pepsi taste just like yours? We've seen this mass customization trend before with products like athletic shoes and even cars but this is mass DIY customization. Before mass customization has been a manufacturing system that allowed users to request special configurations of products. Mass DIY customization is about a end customer being able to customize the product with options or ingredients provided by the manufacturer. It plays into the desire of customers to have experiences of play and experimentation with a product.
All we will need is a nice Web 2.0 social networking site to share tips, techniques and recipes for mixing up what the cool kids are drinking.
This is one of the ways to add more value to the product, and the consequently price increasing.
Customization is tendence but the brands besides want to create more added value / luxury / unique products to increase price & margins of the products.
Good blog!!!
Posted by: Javi Guardiola | Monday, April 03, 2006 at 09:10 AM
Not only is mass customization exploding in the online self-service sector, but now here.
One reason I think this is going to be a great winner is the same reason social-networking sites work so well in reference to user-generated content, pictures and videos.
If one can create their own soda or whatever, who's going to complain about their own creation. Talk about customer satisfaction!
Posted by: Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com) | Thursday, April 27, 2006 at 11:05 PM