E-tailers let you customize cereal, PCs, perfumes and other goods to your tastes

04/19/2001

By PAULA FELPS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Imagine having your own brand of perfume, just like Elizabeth Taylor. Or, instead of dreaming of your face on a box of Wheaties, the cereal you eat each morning actually bears your name. Many Internet retailers are taking a new approach to customer satisfaction – and this time it's personal.

I want it my way • PostFuture Inc.

The interactive nature of the Web, coupled with a vast array of choices, is making it easier for companies to tailor products to a consumer's specific wants and needs. Taking a build-it-yourself mentality, companies are letting customers create a personalized version of everything from breakfast cereal to computers.

"We're big on that type of thing in America," says Jack Staff, director and chief economist for California-based Zona Research. "It's a thriving business in the brick world; it was only a matter of time until it moved to the click world."

Personalization as a selling point is nothing new; long before the Internet came along, Burger King lodged its "Have it your way" slogan into the American consciousness, building upon the universal desire to feel unique and valued in a mass-market world.

The Web has taken that to a new level. Many companies, including Dell Computer and Virtual Micro Technologies, let customers choose their computer components online to build their own dream machines.

"That's part of Dell's selling point right now," Mr. Staff says. "They claim that nine minutes after they receive your order, your computer is being built. It gives people a feeling of being more involved in the process, and they're more in control of what they're buying."

General Mills is among the latest to cater to consumers' individuality. Its test site, MyCereal. com, allows users to make their own breakfast concoctions. If you thought the cereal aisle was mind-boggling, try visiting this site – the company claims there are more than a million possible combinations.

Users go through a list of choices that include a variety of dried fruit, grains, nuts and even sugared and powdered cereal components to make their own, original breakfast food.

They can even throw in nutritionally questionable indulgences such as chocolate chips and macadamia nuts, which then are packaged in individual servings.

The cereal bears the consumer's name and comes in a choice of a pouch or bowl.

While the servings aren't cheap at $1 each, the sales may be worth much more to General Mills.

Hidden value

"Even if it turns out to be economically unfeasible, you've got to look at the market research they'll get out of this," Mr. Staff says.

"Say they get 2,000 people who want almonds, coconut and guava in their cereal. You can have some sense that a cereal like that will sell, and there isn't one on the market today. Finding out that same information through a market research firm would be very expensive."

Other companies are getting similar market research. Late in 1999, Procter & Gamble launched Reflect.com, a site that allows customers to create "one-of-a-kind beauty products." From mascara to body wash to facial scrubs to fragrances, users can create a product, name it and select the packaging they want. Again, there's a price for this kind of customization; a tube of customized mascara costs $16.50, and a 1-ounce bottle of specially created liquid foundation is $49.50.

Clothing was one of the first frontiers for personalization – Mr. Staff points to those sweaters grandma used to knit with the wearer's name worked into the pattern – and Levi's was among the first to experiment with made-to-order jeans. It went online with custom jeans in 1999 but quickly pulled the plug when operations proved too costly.

Now Nike is offering custom products with its Nike iD line, allowing consumers to put their names on everything from running shoes to baseball gloves.

That's not the way of the future, Mr. Staff contends; it's the way of the present, and it's being used for much more than tangible goods.

"We're already there," he says.

"It's much more ubiquitous than we know. We even use it for our dating life. We get online, say we want someone who's this tall, who has these habits, this color hair. ... There's no question that the Internet has brought us to this point."

There's also little doubt that the Internet will take it further. Richard Merrick, president and CEO of the Dallas-based digital direct marketing firm PostFuture Inc., says that personalization technology is changing the way both companies and consumers think.

"We've seen an increase in the use of things like electronic coupons, surveys, things like that, because companies today have to find out what people are interested in and deliver that," says Mr. Merrick, whose company specializes in creating custom e-newsletters, brochures, surveys and videos.

"We've found that in the past three to six months, a lot of brands have discovered the Internet as a direct marketing platform, and it's a way for them to reach the consumer on a more personal basis, as well as gather more information. We see that, more and more, information is being directly targeted to more specific groups of people."

Direct approach

As consumers become more specific about what they want, companies that have access to that insight will bring personalized goods and services to the individual rather than sending the individual to a Web site for a build-it-yourself experience. The combination of market research and previous buying habits will allow businesses to take a personal approach to advertising not yet seen.

"I think what you'll see in the future is that e-mail is going to become like a catalog of highly personalized offers that are delivered right to your computer," Mr. Merrick predicts.

"Personalization will be the key to success for business in the future. Each e-mail will be totally unique, based on that consumer's needs."

That is when e-commerce will truly thrive, says Mr. Staff, who explains that a random e-mail generates a response rate of about 2 percent. But if it includes the recipient's name, that rate more than triples to about 9 percent, he says. Add in knowledge of buying patterns and the response rate goes to about 13 percent, but a directly targeted e-mail will often go into the 20 percent response rate – a rate that is practically unheard of in the bricks-and-mortar realm.

"That's like being able to touch every five people at the mall and bring them into your store," says Mr. Staff. "That's where personalization will lead us.

"The more [companies] can find out exactly what we want, the more they can deliver that."

Paula Felps is a free-lance writer in Lewisville.

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