This century was off-the-peg: the next will be tailor-made; What does this mean for brand marketing strategies? ask Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley.

As we enter the new millennium, we are standing on the edge of the second stage of the consumer revolution.

The first stage, which swept across Europe after the second world war, ushered in mass consumption. Economies-of-scale were used to bring about a huge expansion of standardised goods and services available to ordinary people at affordable prices.

Today, Sainsbury's largest stores stock some 20,500 product lines. But alongside that variety, there is a great deal of uniformity. One tin of baked beans is much the same as another.

All that is beginning to change as we enter a new phase of consumerism in the 21st century - mass customisation.

Increasingly, economies-of-scale are being harnessed to tailor goods and services exactly to what individuals or small groups of customers want. Technology means that businesses can still meet their customers' demands through mass production, but in ways which offer people their own choice of products which are personalised and made to measure.

You can now go into a shop, order a pair of Levi jeans to suit your exact measurements and have them delivered immediately - without any loss of economy of scale to the manufacturer.

You can call musicmaker.com and order a disc made up of tracks of your individual choice.

Ford's production lines are no longer turning out hundreds of identical vehicles; they are making each one to a specific order but at a still lower unit cost.

In some ways it feels like the situation that existed before the industrial revolution, when goods were crafted to a purchaser's specific …