Mass customization are an opportunity for leading contents

Great post describing an initiative on mass customization applied to newspaper. I still remember how in my business school we studied mass-customization around Dell. Dell offered capabilities to final customers to set up their hardware requirements and they would get a product that would better fit them. But also, I remember this was the case for pizza delivery because you may choose the ingredients.

The initiative consists in:

You register online and select up to seven newspaper sections by checking a box. (…)
The participating newspapers deliver their product in PDF format to the Swiss Post, which then sends them to Syntops where the company’s custom software, Syntops GmbH, assembles individualized PDFs. The PDFs are printed and dropped off to Swiss Post by 7 a.m. for delivery to the home by 11 a.m. There also is a digital version of Personal News available online.

In terms of technology, it’s a kind of DM with more contents; it’s not as complex as it may appear if there is a good information management.  Advantages of this system would be to make a more relevant newspaper and to have better possibilities for advertising targeting.

Being an interesting attempt of innovating in newspaper industry, we get to a kind of print on demand service. This is an already existing commodity service.  Printing is not necessary for most contents, and, if you heavily use e-ink, like I do, printed books and papers become something even inconvenient. It is possible to syndicate your favourite sources online, to easily build up a .txt very light file and to carry it on your ereader and you don’t need to pay nor to get any advertisement.

I like the idea of the newspapers offering a customized newspaper, but, as information gathering literacy spreads, and audience mature, they will be more able to reach their sources without any third party involved in this process. In fact, I would prefer to make a comment on mass customization more than in this concrete initiative.

The key is still having powerful contents and values so that people chose us as a reliable source. The power to aggregate is in users’ hands. We may provide tools (like bloglines, netvibes or google reader) but what we have to give them is powerful contents.

Quality media will find in mass customization a huge opportunity. Being an opinion maker, a leader in a market will make a media chosen even by the people who may disagree with their statements.  In fact, by supporting those statements or by opposition, with a clear standpoint, media can become catch-all  (catch-all is a concept taken from Political Science). Catching all audiences  widen reach and opens up a difficult entry barrier to competitors.

Catch-all media, like catch-all political parties, will tend to lead and aggregate people preferences. Mass customization is the opportunity for catch-all media to be not just in your traditional audience, but to get constantly into an incremental sector of audience that was always approaching your contents from the other side, and before, they never bought us in paper.

Credits: CC image by inju