Strategies for Customer Satisfaction and Customer Requirement Fulfillment within the Trend of Individualization

Abstract Individualization is one of the current megatrends in the product development. The literature offers approaches for customization of which individualization emerged. Nevertheless, it is not emphasized if the approaches are also applicable for focusing each individual customer and his requirements within individualization. Also, the achievable customer’s requirements fulfillment compared to the induced internal complexity is disregarded. Therefore, this paper clusters different individualization strategies for fulfilling customer-individual requirements and emphasizes the induced complexity, solution approaches, the resulting customer benefit and limitations for each strategy. Afterwards, decision-making models for finding the right strategy for the own business are reviewed and discussed.