The international benchmark study “The customization 500” was conducted by Prof. Frank Piller and Prof. Dominik Walcher. The objective of the study is to provide a showcase of the state-of-the-art of mass customization. The two specialists of mass customization and personalization collected and analyzed information about 500 companies offering customized products.

To systemize the great diversity of offered products, they developed a classification system with eleven categories. As you can see in the figure below, they found out that the categories Personalized Media and Personalized Fashion are dominating the field of mass customization. Personalized media encompasses e.g printed books or calendars, personalized fashion are e.g. t-shirts, blankets or underwear.

The assessment process of the 500 websites is distinguished between characteristics and evaluations. The characteristics are based on objective measures, which are visualization features, navigation help, company help and customer help. These dimensions have values between zero (no feature found) and four (all features found).

The evaluations are measured on a 1 to 5 rating scale, where 5 is the best rating. The evaluations are: visual realism, usability, creativity, enjoyment and uniqueness. The objective was to have every single website evaluated by at least three independent experts to guarantee the quality of data.

The results are very interesting and give a good overview of the topic and the practical implementation. If you are interested in the study please have a look at www.mc-500.com where you can download a preview for free or buy the study.