By now we have all seen the studies and even experienced first-hand the value of personalization in direct mail and other forms of communication. But what about the value of personalization in products and packaging? There are a lot of projections into what the market value couldbe. For example, according to a 2017 study, the expected value of the personalized gift market will increase 55% from 2016 to 2021 to an estimated value of $31B. Another study from Deloitte estimates that 50% of Millennial and Gen Z consumers express a desire for personalized products. Or that 70% of shoppers are willing to pay 10%+ for personalized products. 

If accurate, that is all great news, but how do you take advantage of that? Purchasing technology to support personalization has been available for a while, and new technology is being released regularly, but it doesn’t answer the questions about which consumers will buy the personalized products and, more importantly, why. HP was interested in understanding the “who and whys” and set out on a journey to learn for themselves and to better drive marketing efforts. Ultimately, they would also use that information to develop tools to help drive the need and then identify and target those opportunities for their service provider customers. 

A recent HP-funded study performed by sparks & honey, a consultancy division of Omnicom, attempts to identify and better define those drivers and potential opportunities. The study, “Exploring Personalization” produced in September 2018, studied over 45 million online conversations in four markets (US, China, Germany, and France) and looked at six unique drivers. These six drivers were determined to represent the way that consumers view themselves in relationship to their product decisions. The HP Personalization Pinwheel shown below identifies each of the drivers. While it may seem a little abstract at first, if you look at each of these drivers you can probably see how you and others could identify with each of these. Each of these segments shows the percentage of total respondents that align with each of them.