"Personalization" a fact of life for the web…maybe for fashion too


by Jerry Mica
New Media Consultant.

The holiday season came and went and it seems the true winners by all industry accounts were companies that had actively pursued an online retail component to compliment their existing offline establishment. Online retailing, according to Jupiter Research exceeded last year's holiday season (Nov1 - Dec 31) by over 3 billion dollars. Why? Is it just the convenience or the price incentives often offered by online retailers? In reality, it was both these things and one all-important differentiator, the web's ability to "personalize" the shopping experience.

What does personalization mean? Well, for starters the client's purchasing habits can be monitored and the client has the ability to offer information about their likes and needs to the retailer without any frustrating or embarrassing procedures. These two sources of information, when matched with each other, can allow the retailer to make suggestions and offers to the client seamlessly and at the same time extend their ability to create loyalty or retention marketing campaigns with minimal effort.

This kind of shopping experience goes beyond typical brick & mortar retail paradigms, because the client can easily maintain an active dialogue with the retailer, who can reward these clients for their loyalty and provide the means to allow the client to monitor purchases, sales, new products and incentive offers without every leaving the house. This attention to the individual, along with the overwhelming advantage of time economics makes for a powerful model that has not only influenced how business simply does business but as well as how we envision the things we purchase.

Beyond couture…Personalization for the masses

If how we buy items can be personalized to our individual needs, so can the products themselves be personalized. Fashion, being the ultimate expression of individuality, may just be the next embracer of "personalization" for the masses. We have already seen successful execution of product personalization within companies like Nike and their Nike ID service (nikeid.nike.com) and Adidas with their new Mi Adidas product offerings (adidas.com), but it maybe just a matter of time before we begin to see the personalization of products on many levels within the fashion market on a whole. It may not simply come in the form of specialized orders but more like our cell phones, with their downloadable rings tones and graphics…simply - a product with a design that allows us to modify it in ways that connects intimately with our personalities or mood.

This is the major influence the web may seemingly have over all previous traditions of retail and retail marketing. With fashion being an industry of billions of dollars a year, it is just simply a matter of time before we begin to see the emergence of personalization as a key competitive marker allowing the fashion retailers to dig deeper into the minds and bodies of its customers. For fashion is the true barometer of culture, and "personalization", I believe, will be its way into connecting and influencing the way we ultimately envision how we express ourselves.