Brompton Bicycles produces one product, a folding bicycle, but customisation of everything - from handlebar shape to frame colour – means there are 17 million possible combinations it can build. That's quite an achievement. But mass customisation has come at a price - for both consumers, as a bike typically costs around £1,000, and for the brand itself, as marketing had for many years taken a back seat to engineering.
In one sense there hadn't actually been any real requirement for marketing, Harry Mann, Head of Customer Experience, told the Festival of Marketing (London, October 2017). There was global demand...