As the consumer becomes more aware and enlightened, I was just wondering if the personal care products will become more customizable for specific consumer needs rather than making a choice from a large variety of products offered by multiple competetors. How do we determine if such a need exists, and if yes, how do we adapt our plants, processes and technology to meet this challenge?

Spot on analysis. 25 years ago, when I left school, colleges were lecturing to technicians and crafts people. Technicians received up to second year degree level education over a 5 to 7 year period part time, and 4 years full time. Craft people and technicans learned practical skills that they could use in their daily jobs, or potentially when they became first tier managers, to help others in their companies.
Today, few colleges lecture technicians and craft people. Instead of a structured learnign process, they have problem based learning projects. They try to understand what the problem is, what the need to know to fix the problem, and then ask for assistance – explanations, technical data and guidance. This type of learning relies on their creativity and motivation to experiment, while the formal lecture style of education has moved almost exclusively to the domain of universities. These in turn are charging higher and higher annual fees, and are packed out with foreign students that will take the lessons learnt back home when they finish. The current batch of university lecturers and college teachers shall eventually retire, leaving a knowkedge vacuum that shall then in turn require US and other Western students to travel East to obtain their prized degrees. Certainly on-line learning can be provided to everyone everywhere, however the significant risk is that experience that underpins these modules shall be lost too.
The United States forces large corporations that have a significant purchase spend to dedicate some of that budget to minority owned enterprises. To qualify, companies must be majority owned by women and ethnic minorities.
Your last comment about the “drive (to) “source” and “make” operations closer to points of product consumption” is less to do with petrolium, although this is a factor. Most imports have a cost of transportation of less than 1% of landed cost. Making in China or elsewhere where the unit price is low is a good strategy if the design never changes and the products have a low ‘time cost of money’ – they do not depreciate or are not made obsolete quickly, and do not cost much to store. However, to obtain the low unit price, many thousands or millions of units must be bought. This drives up the total invoice paid. Honda, under Dave Nelson, took the strategy ‘make where you sell, buy where you make’ in order to make just-in-time work. For this reason, we can now see Japanese companies like Nissan, Honda and Toyota setting up ‘transplant’ facilities to produce in America goods sold in America.
Setting up in Mexico – certainly. Just take a drive from down-town Monterrey to the airport. For 20 miles, 30 km, roughly 80% of the factories are Chinese owned. Their approach is simple. Mass produce component parts in China with a low value and price. Export these to Mexico. Assemble to order and distribute to the customer – door to door – within 24 to 48 hours. This approach increases the value add within NAFTA to above the minimum 60% threshold in order to have zero import tax to the US or Canada. They also reduce the value of the stock to its lowest level until it is required. The Chinese companies in Monterrey have applied the Toyota Production System and Honda strategy, within the legal and taxation structure, and are now winning. Recent news that German output increased 40% this year, and that the German government is to tighten their fiscal belt is considered sustainable. German brands look set to profit from the superluxury brand segment in China, where about half of their profit is coming from.
The recent ‘banking crisis’ and sub-prime situation created this dip in economic performance. The manufacturing sector pulled the world out of recession from 1929 through 1989. In 1990, the UK had 26% of the labour force working in manufacturing. Today, this is about 9%. The UK had over 140 vehicle brands before WWII. The last high volume UK brand to produce vehicles was Rover, which was owned for a while by BMW. To paraphrase Clarkson from “Top Gear”‘, “It isn’t that we don’t make good things, it’s just that (British owned companies) make nothing at all”.