Keeping it personal while growing the business: the German Mittelstand approach

Abstract

Purpose

For firms that depend on personalized management as a key element of their competitive advantage, maintaining personalized management in the face of sustained growth presents a particular challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms in the Germanic Mittelstand have endeavored to “scale up” personalization.

Design/methodology/approach

Different ways of scaling up personalization are explained with examples.

Findings

The concept of personalization need not just concern customers, in contrast to conventional treatments of personalization. Mittelstand firms illustrate the scaling up of personalization to target stakeholder groups other than just customers.

Research limitations/implications

In recent years, personalization has come to refer to the customization of products to the preferences of individual customers. In contrast, a neglected but important topic is personalization of and within firms. Personalization refers to imbuing a firm with the personal qualities of individual personalities indissociable from management of the company.

Practical implications

Methods for scaling up personalization need to be truly scalable to be effective. Methods that only enable a one-time enlargement in the scope of the personalized business are liable to fail in the longer run.

Originality/value

By examining personalization as an important characteristic of small to medium-sized firms that they wish to maintain as they grow larger, this study highlights a little noticed dimension of Mittelstand growth strategies – and endeavors to bring personality back into research on “personalization.”

Citation

Lehrer, M. and Schmid, S. (2022), "Keeping it personal while growing the business: the German Mittelstand approach", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 148-156. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-11-2020-0260