A lot of people believe that hand made things are better, but usually machines are far more capable of making more accurate and high quality products.
Mass production enables us to have things that would otherwise be cost prohibitive at attainable prices.
Cons:
- everything starts to become homgeneous
- globalization: in France, famous for fashion, you get H&M. In Italy famous for food and coffee, you have Starbucks everywhere
- products creating images that tell people how they should live
“We are entering a global culture of mediocrity and conformity.” Yet we are all different individuals with different experiences and cultural backgrounds.
Customer Revolution A shift in power from the global corporation to that of individual power. Corporations are finding themselves increasingly needing to respond to customer demand. Computerization has enabled a 2-way relationship between company and person.
One of the outcomes of this is mass personalization of products.
- Mini Cooper gave customers the ability to customize so many things about your new car while ordering online.
- Modular devices, watches with interchangeable modules that change it’s functionality. ie. Google’s Project Ara
Personalized Experiences
- with Nike+ they created an online service and community that connected them to other runners
- this creates a longer, 2-way engagement with the company and product, rather than the endless cycle of make product, market product, sell product, repeat.
Utilization
- things like autonomous vehicles will create a future where we shift from private vehicle ownership to that of fleets of shared vehicles that arrive to service your needs
Custom tailored shoes and clothes via foot or body scans that produce perfectly fitting clothing.
The “uberization” of product. You keep a body scan on file and then can just look on your phone to pick the things you want.
Why wait? Frog helped Disney deal with the waiting problem with the creation of the MagicBand.
- band acts as ticket to parks, payment method, use of the Fast Pass system, room key, and personalized ride experiences
- reduces wait times and increases the magic factor
- addresses privacy by only storing a serial number on the device and only pings out with a code that is changing every few seconds - and on the user side the experience is carefully crafted to allow the users to control what and how much information is attached to their profiles
“Individuals are now able to fund, create, and sell their own products.” - brings us back to the pre-industrial age where there was a much closer relationship between the maker and buyer.
Shapeways - let’s you design your own product (jewelry, parts, whatever) and have it 3D printed and delivered to you. But it’s also a marketplace where others can buy your design.