Web lets the consumer design the product

CHICAGO - Levi Strauss wants to get personal. So do Millstone coffee and General Mills.

Makers of household products, toys and apparel are increasingly using the Web to allow consumers to design their own coffee blends, cereal and dolls.

The concept of letting customers design their own products on the Internet was pioneered several years ago by Dell Computer Corp.

But now some companies that manufacture even the most basic consumer products are trying customization as a way to drive sales in low-growth areas.

"That's the background," Patrick Schumann, branded consumer products analyst at Edward Jones said.

"It's stagnant markets, low growth of sales, low population growth, very fragmented industries. So each of these consumer products companies is trying to get the edge."

Procter & Gamble Co. has a Web site that allows you to create your own blend of its Millstone coffee after answering a number of questions about taste, consistency and appearance.

Aside from questions about coffee, the Personal Blends site asks how spicy or mild a person prefers salsa to be and how light or dark they like their chocolate, all of which help pin down characteristics that person would enjoy in a cup of coffee, the company said.

The answers to these questions are used to form a personalized "tasteprint." From there, Millstone combines beans with different characteristics to match the customer's tasteprint and then ships the coffee. The company said it can make several hundred blends, using different beans and roasts.

The coffee sells for US$9.95 ($22) a 12-ounce bag, a premium of about $1 to $1.25 a bag, Procter & Gamble said.

Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble is also the major shareholder in Reflect.com, a Web-based beauty care products retailer that lets women create customized products.

Customization helps Procter & Gamble learn more about what its customers want - information that can be used throughout the company's businesses, said Nathan Estruth, marketing director for interactive ventures.

"It's really about how do we deal with the consumer on a one-to-one scale," he said.

At the same time, Procter & Gamble is not actively looking to offer customization for a lot of other products.

"It comes back to where do the consumers see value, and there are some categories where a truly individualistic product gives value and other products where it doesn't," Estruth said.

Apparel maker Levi Strauss & Co. enables customers to design their own jeans on the Web, adjusting size and specific features, though customers still have to phone a Levi's store to place the order.

"It's primarily a customer service issue, making sure that there's no misconception about what's going to happen," Jen Crook, manager of the mass customization area for Levi Strauss, said of the need to call in an order.

General Mills hopes some customers will see value in individualized cereals. The maker of Wheaties and Cheerios plans to test a Web site where customers can combine different ingredients and nutrients to come up with over 1 million possible cereal combinations.

The cereals will sell at the premium price of $1 a serving and will be shipped within four business days. Capacity restrictions will limit the number of customers who will have access to the site and a time sensitive code will be required to log on, the company said.

General Mills also looks at mycereal.com as a way to gather consumer information. That could be the key to making customization pay off for basic, lower-priced goods, said Ranjay Gulati, associate professor of technology and e-commerce at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

"Now I can use that information to cross-sell and up-sell to you and start a dialogue with you," Gulati said of how manufacturers can use information gained through customization.

"If they are going to use this approach to just make cereal, I think they are wasting their time."

Internet sales are a small fraction of overall revenues for consumer product companies and most use the Web for advertising and customer contact, rather than sales.

But companies and analysts note that the Internet allows them to gather much more information than ever before about what a consumer might want.

Still, some analysts question the customization of a product like cereal, especially since there are dozens of choices on grocery store shelves.

"As soon as you force the consumer to start to make ... decisions down to the ingredient level, I think you start to dilute what it is that the brand is supposed to deliver to the consumer," Ken Cassar, senior retail analyst at Jupiter Research, said.

Toymaker Mattel has found that customization does not necessarily translate into sales.

The company has decided to stop selling custom-designed dolls on its Barbie website, because not enough were being sold to make sense economically, spokeswoman Julia Jensen said.

Girls will still be able to design their own dolls on the Web site, but only for fun.

"I do not think that mass customization will redefine manufacturing and buying as we currently know it," Cassar said.

"The truth of the matter is that 90 percent of consumers are comfortable with the products that everybody else buys."

Links:

Personal Blends

Reflect.com

Levi's

mycereal.com

Barbie