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Measuring the effectiveness of a mass customization and personalization strategy: a market- and organizational-capability-based index
Ashok Kumar Æ Kathryn E. Stecke
Published online: 22 April 2008

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract The research of Kumar (Int J Flex Manuf Syst 16(4):287–312, 2004) isexpanded to develop a methodology that measures the effectiveness of a masscustomization and personalization strategy using a mass customization and personalizationeffectiveness index. This index extends Kumar (2004) in threesignificant ways: (1) it encompasses both service and manufacturing companies, (2)the assessment of product customization considers that customers assign differentweights to different product features, and (3) the index captures the impact of bothmarket perception and system capabilities. Three different measures are proposed.
Which is appropriate should be a function of a particular company’s parameters.
The circumstances under which each measure is best is a subject for future research.The validation and reliability of this index and these measures are also issues that
should be addressed by future research.
Keywords Mass customization
Personalization
Index
Effectiveness of a strategy
1 Introduction
Mass customization as a business strategy has gained momentum in recent years(Kumar et al. 2007) in part because of its multidimensional impact on a company’spursuit of strategic ascendancy. Piller and Kumar (2006) have shown that
A. Kumar (&)Department of Management, Grand Valley State University, DeVos Center, # 454C, 401 West
Fulton, Grand Rapids, MI 49504, USA
K. E. Stecke
School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083-0688, USA
e-mail: KStecke@utdallas.edu
123
Int J Flex Manuf Syst (2007) 19:548–569
DOI 10.1007/s10696-008-9047-7
companies that deploy mass customization to gain strategic advantage experience
improvements not only in price and customization performance, as is commonly
believed. They also register gains in performances on other competitive priorities
such as quality, delivery, and customer service.
Kumar (2004) and Spahi (2007) attempt to measure the effectiveness of a mass
customization strategy. Kumar’s measure is based on product characteristics and
production batch size. This preliminary work was limited in three ways: (1) it only
considered the operational function of a business organization, (2) it was only
applicable to manufacturing companies, and (3) it assumed all product features to be
equally important, leading, for example, to a situation where a car customer would
accord equal weight to the shape of the rear view mirror to that of fuel consumption
rating. Spahi (2007) developed a mass customization scale applicable to manufacturing
companies along the lines of Kumar (2004). The primary goal was to find an
optimal level of customization that should be built into a product to maximize profit.
Price or cost was not considered, missing, thereby, the measurement of ‘‘mass’’
aspect of mass customization.
In this paper, a mass customization and personalization effectiveness index
(MCPEI) is developed to measure the success of a mass customization and
personalization strategy on a unit scale. The MCPEI developed in this paper extends
Kumar (2004) as follows:

References
Alexander B (1996) How to construct a service quality 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。