Personalization

Personalization

Personalization must not be mixed up with customization (Note: the following is my personal understanding of both terms. There are many different definitions of personalization). While customization relates to changing, assembling or modifying product or service components according to customers' needs and desires, personalization involves intense communication and interaction between two parties, namely customer and supplier. Personalization in general is about selecting or filtering information objects for an individual by using information about the individual (the customer profile) and then negotiating the selection with the individual.

Thus, personalization compares strongly to recommendation: From a large set of possibilities, customer specific recommendations are selected. From a technical point of view, automatic personalization or recommendation means matching meta-information of products or information objects to meta-information of customers (stored in the customer profile). Personalization is increasingly considered to be an important ingredient of Web applications. In most cases personalization techniques are used for tailoring information services to personal user needs.

See this article about Personalization on Wikipedia.org for additional information.

(Mass) Customization versus Personalization

A good example of both customization and personalization is provided by Lands' End, a catalog retailer. The company is a pioneer of exploring personalization techniques on the Internet and has been using a virtual model and recommendation service on its web site since 1999. The system recommends a customized bundle of standard mass products matching each other and the customers' style profile. This service provides customers with a set of coherent outfits rather than with isolated articles of clothing. But each product is still a standard product.

In 2001, Land's End also introduced mass customization. Customers can order made-to-measure trousers and shirts. All products are made to order in a specially assigned factory. The company offers a substantial number of design options and varieties. However, this customization process is not supported by personalization. A consumer has to know by herself which style, waistline and length suits her best. The configuration toolkit used by Land's End does not provide any information or consultancy. For this company, personalization as performed for (almost ironically) standard products would only provide real additional benefit for the mass customization operations. Combining personalization with customization would empower a customer without the knowledge of a tailor to customize a product more easily.