Representation of personalized products on internet sites from the perspective of consumer culture

In the middle of 20th century, Fordist production system has brought mass production so that massified the consumption. Mass consumption has emerged as a concept allow consumers to consume mass produced products unsuitable for personalization if they are not Do-It Yourself goods. At the end of the 20th century, the changing processes of production have evolved into a structure that allows the parts of the products to be produced in different places, which has also changed the structure of consumption. The new technological facilities and means of communication that concomitant with these processes have facilitated the circulation of production and information and the transportation of consumer products. This fragmented structure has created a space that identical with the postmodern state. In this space, time and place became irrelevant, individualism became prominent, past and future left behind; place replaced with "now and everywhere". The concept of consumption has also reshaped; postmodern consumer culture has become dominant, brought out the ambiguous and disconnected from time and place, individualistic and hedonistic qualities. Serial personalization has emerged as a phenomenon innate in postmodern consumption structure, independent from time and place with the development of new media, which appeals to individual pleasures. Because it is in today's consumer culture as a phenomenon that makes possible products selected and shaped through the interfaces and can choose characteristics from the options offered by the manufacturer without having to move the consumer from her/his place. Moreover, it is also emerged a new form of "craft" which has say on the form of product s/he ordered. Based on these data, the study analysed the serial personalized product advertisements on the brands 'internet sites through the Barthes' semiotic method. The findings of the study show that the serial personalized products marketing an experience of custom-built product in their advertisements and thus imitating the roles of consumer and artisan as exactly same as in the past in context of experience economy. So that kind of imitated products named as "pseudo-artisanal". Keywords: Consumption, consumer culture, advertisement, serial personalization, pseudo-artisanal.