BeFunky.

com
Customerization
CRBR Assignment
Group 1

Mohammed Ayyubi
Paritosh Kashyap
Ravi Karteek Yakkala
Sagar Saxena
Subhashis Biswas
BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Contents
CUSTOMERIZATION.....................................................................................................................................3
Pathways to Customerization......................................................................................................................5
Customer Involvement............................................................................................................................5
Customer Choice.....................................................................................................................................6
How does it work?.......................................................................................................................................7
Step 1 – Browse the photo you’d like to apply digital effects to..............................................................7
Step -2 - Browse the photos effects to see what you're in the mood for................................................8
Step 3 - And then play around with the settings!....................................................................................9
Why BeFunky.com ?..................................................................................................................................10
Video Cartoonizer......................................................................................................................................12
Features.....................................................................................................................................................13
Photo storage and tracking....................................................................................................................13
Print and create a product.....................................................................................................................14
Add speech bubbles and cool shapes....................................................................................................14
Sharing of best practices........................................................................................................................15
Various effects to enhance photo quality..............................................................................................15
iPhone Application.................................................................................................................................16
Pricing Plans..............................................................................................................................................17
References.................................................................................................................................................19

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

CUSTOMERIZATION
Customerization is next revolution in the field of mass customization. According to Wikipedia
Customerization is the customization of products or services through personal interaction
between a company and the customer. A company is customerized when it’s able to dialogue
with individual customers and respond by customizing its products, services, and messages on a
one-to-one basis. Here the company provides a platform to the end users where both the
company and the end users collaborate in a horizontal fashion. Though there is no hard and fast
rule of collaboration but it is generally it have been seen that this collaboration happens over the
web. Generally it is the digital platform that facilitates the customerization. Web provides an
easy platform where the vendor and can share it resources with the end users. These resources
include logistics, technical tools, codes, widgets etc.

MASS CUSTOMIZATION + CUSTOMIZED MARKETING = CUSTOMERIZATION

Fundamentally business all around us has been traditionally seller centric and there had been no
significant consideration for the end users. But over the period of time this approach is changing
and businesses is becoming more and more customer centric where a lot of power and authority
is shifting towards the customers. This trend of customerization is another step in the given
paradigm shift procedure.

Combining mass customization with customized marketing, customerization allows firms to

adapt one-to-one marketing and personalization strategies to the digital environment. It
empowers the customers to make their own design according to their inclination. Such strategies
often require little prior information about customers, and the product itself can be manufactured
after customers tell the company what they want to buy.

As a part of its CRBR assignment “GROUP -1” has studied the customerization process at
befunky.com.

Befunky.com provides a platform to the end users for designing, editing and beautification of
their photo graphs. The website is basically of Turkish origin. Over the past few years it had
been phenomenon ally successful.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

It was founded by Tekin Tatar and Kemal Ozisikcilar in the year 2007. Initially during the
strating pahse it didnot givemuch of service to the end users. It gave only twoservice that is the
cartoonizer and - The and Uvatar. But as soon as it was launched it made a killing in the
market. With growing popularity lot of new features were added to to it and it got evolved into a
fully fledged photo effects application running on the web

• The cartoonizer tool by virtue of which one can cartoonize a photo worked like a crowd
puller for befunky.com. Today the given website is immensely popular and is among the
hottest start up across the world. The website has created 169,468,576 artwork so far. The
popularity of the website can be realized from the fact its page at face book has more than
25000 registered users.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Pathways to Customerization

Operational
Customization

Befunky.com has taken a typically “Made to Order” products like coffee mugs and t-shirts with
personalized photos printed on them and combined them with the mass customization of having
the customization of the products at the end of the value chain. This had resulted in providing
customerization to the customers of Befunky.com. This has created a new market for the
company instead of competing in the traditional markets for customers.

Customer Involvement
The website has a high level of customer involvement. The website requires it in each
and every step of personalizing a product. For example, to order a coffee mug with your photo
on it, the website allows you to choose the kind of coffee mug, the color of the mug, and your

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own photo that has to be printed on the mug. This involvement changes the customer from
passive to an active participant at every stage of the product design and development.

Customer Choice
The website is also useful for users of photoshop, GIMP or any of the other photo editing
software products available in the market. The website reduces the number of steps to achieve
similar effects drastically using any of these softwares by standardizing the processes. Also, the
website refrains from offering too many options to edit the photos available in some
conventional softwares to a few standard options thereby reducing the customer confusion and/or
psychological shutdown which can occur when a potential user is exposed to too many editing
options.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

How does it work?

Step 1 – Browse the photo you’d like to apply digital effects to

BeFunky.com allows you to upload pictures/images from your desktop or from an online source
such as Flickr or Facebook albums. The entire user interface (UI) of the website caters to an
online experience without launching any client software on the user’s computer. This is allows a
complete web experience of the entire application. Once the user selects the photo/image/picture
that needs an upload, the site allows the user to choose the entire picture for modification or a
particular part of the picture that requires modification.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Step -2 - Browse the photos effects to see what you're in the mood for

The next step is where BeFunky.com acts as a differentiator in that it allows users to modify the
photos according to presets that are loaded under ‘Photo Effects’ on the left pane of the web
page. The ‘Photo Effects’ pane is a constantly updated feature which keeps BeFunky.com ahead
of its competitor websites in terms of the feature sets that it allows. There are over 190 easy-to-
use photo effects in 30 different categories. This one-click feature makes BeFunky.com far easier
for both amateur as well as professional users to play around with when compared to
conventional graphic imaging softwares like Coral Draw or Adobe Photoshop.

For example, the image above has been modified using the ‘Stenciler’ effect. And as can be seen
from the screenshot above, the stenciler effect in itself has over 10 different sub combinations
that can be used. Some of the effects marked as ‘Plus’ require the user to pay for the effects to be
applied on the image. These are premium features that the user needs to subscribe to.

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Step 3 - And then play around with the settings!

The next step involves further modification to the image that has already been applied with a
preset photo effect. Further modifications can take place with the ‘Adjustments’ tab at the top of
the page that allows the user to change the brightness/contrast, exposure, saturation levels and
color filters. This enhanced suite of image adjustments allows the user to further modify the
photo and thus adds an additional level of customerization for the user to take advantage of.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Why BeFunky.com ?
The reasons why people should choose BeFunky.com are multifarious. However few of them are
documented below:

1. No Login necessary: Some basic features of BeFunky.com are available for any user
without an authorised login. These features mainly include the photo effects. However
the output would be of a lower resolution, with watermarks, with advertisements of
BeFunky.com, limited upload facilities, etc. Premium features of high resolution, without
watermarks, photostorage etc are available to premium users which comes with nominal
subscription amount.

2. Suite of One-click photo Enhancements: A complete suite of photo enhancement tools

are available to the users. These services incorporate a number of photo enhancement
facilities like stencil effects, negative style effects etc which can be applied to the photo
on a single click. Whereas in other photo-editing tools like Adobe Photoshop the same
needs the user to understand and go though a number of steps. This makes photo-editing
all the more convenient and an enjoyable experience for the user.

3. No Skill or Technical Knowledge Required: Photo –editing or applying effects needs

quite a bit of technical knowledge and skills when it comes to using the available tools
like Photoshop or Coral Draw, GIMP etc. However with BeFunky.com all these
functions like sharpening, contrast, colour adjustments, hue, etc on a single click, thus
making it all the more easier for users and especially for users who are not that much
knowledgeable about photo editing.

4. Smart Enhancement Tools: With BeFunky.com fixing the common problems of over or
under exposure, digital noise, poor colour quality, hue, sharpness, etc can be solved and
edited in no time. All these can be done with user friendly interfaces and complete
understanding of what the customer wants.

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5. Biggest and best digital arts effects portfolio: BeFunky.com has the biggest repository
of the best of the digital effects available. With over 190 different photo effects in 30
categories it offers its users almost any effect and customization that the user wants.

6. Photo Sharing via different social media: BeFunky.com allows its users to share
pictures across a lot of social media like facebook, myspace, picasa, flickr, etc. The
pictures can be directly downloaded from the respective websites, edited and then
uploaded directly to the websites making it all the more convenient for the users. They
can do the entire sequence of activities directly from the BeFunky.com website.

7. Create Customized Photo Products: With BeFunky.com users can create customized
photo products starting from T-shirts and mugs to stationeries and calendars through
Zazzle. Customers can have their personalized photos printed on the above articles. This
in turn gives the customers an experience of creating something new, something
extremely personalized and as per the wishes. One has the freedom to create a
customized product for oneself.

In the words of Tekin Tatar, CEO & Co-Founder of BeFunky:"With digital cameras in 81% of
U.S. households and hundreds of billions of photos stored and shared online, there's no doubting
how much people love their photos. BeFunky gives all those people a great outlet to express
their pent-up creativity, regardless of talent or technical skill. We like to think of it as the photo
editing equivalent of the point and shoot camera."

Which explains the underlying philosophy of BeFunky.com giving the entire freedom to the
customer to use their imagination, creativity and create personalized photos for and it does not
stop there also, they can even get their photos printed on a wide variety of usable products. And
all this can be done irrespective of the talent or technical skill of the user. Making BeFunky.com
an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Video Cartoonizer

The ‘Video Cartoonizer’ was a feature that was added later to BeFunky.com’s existing suite of
image enhancements. But unlike other enhancements, this allowed entire videos to be
cartoonized and thus took the level of customerization one step higher wherein users could not
modify still images but could also apply the ever popular cartoonizer effects to moving images as
well.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, a still from a modified clip of the movie ‘300’ has
been cartoonized thereby allowing users to create a cartoon version of any video in their
possession.

This feature of BeFunky.com drove a lot of new users to BeFunky.com thereby increasing the
popularity of the image editing portal.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Features
Befunky.com provides the users an array of features which add value to the service provided by
them. Few of these features can be listed down as follows:

Photo storage and tracking

Befunky.com provides a valuable service to its users by enabling photo storage and easy
tracking. This helps the users to access the information anytime, anywhere. However for this
feature the user needs to create a login and the data will be available once the user signs in his
account. It increases the convenience for the user.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Print and create a product

In collaboration with Zazzle, Befunky.com provides a useful feature of printing and creating a
customerised product for the users. The user is able to create products like t-shirts, cups, etc. and
is able to print the uploaded photos on them. It increases the involvement of the user.

Add speech bubbles and cool shapes

Along with the feature of adding effects on the photos, Befunky.com also allows to add speech
bubbles and cool shapes on the photos. This helps the users to associate the photos with a
particular incident or to add more dramatic effects. With the help of this Befunky.com provides
significant value to the customers.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Sharing of best practices

Befunky.com facilitates a forum where the users share the best practices and advice other users
in case they are stuck up with something related to the site. This increases the convinience for the
customers by allowing the users help each other. This not only decreases the load on the
customer service of the site, but also gives the users a sense of achievement if their tip is applied
by any other user. Hence they are encouraged to visit the site more often.

Various effects to enhance photo quality

Befunky.com supports various effects to enhance the photo quality. These effects include
sketcher effect, Inkify effect, Cyano type effect, Charcoal drawing facilities and so on. In
addition to the provision of the effects it should be noted that these effects are very easy to
implement. With just a single click all these effects can be realised which were a tedious set of
processes in other stand-alone photo editing softwares.

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iPhone Application
BeFunky.com also provides an iPhone application which helps higher degree of accessibility by
the users. The users now can use the features of BeFunky.com from their iPhone, thus making it
all the more convinient for the users.

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BeFunky.com Customerization – Group 1

Pricing Plans

The pricing plans that BeFunky.com vary across three levels –

1) Basic – This is a free plan that is open to all users. The plan allows basic photo editing
options and as can be seen from the comparison above, it does not have the scope that the
other plans have. This plan is suitable for most users who might be amateurs when it
comes to photo editing and modification and may not require high end photo editing
tools. The basic plan imposes watermarks over the modified images that can only be
removed by subscribing to the premium or professional plans.

2) Premium – This is $4.95 monthly plan that offers far better output resolution than the
Basic plan. This plan is most suitable for amateurs who want to lay their hands on more
sophisticated forms of photo modification and allows features such as Full screen
workspace, multiple file uploads, photo storage and tracking, etc.

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3) Professional – This plan comes at a nominal cost of $14.95 per month. The advantage
that this plan allows over the previous plan is that it offers a far higher resolution (upto
4000X4000 pixels). The other features offered remain the same when compared to the
Premium plan.

BeFunky.com also allows special offers on annual subscriptions with savings ranging upto 58%.

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References
1) www.BeFunky.com
2) Cusotmerization: The Second Revolution in Mass Customization – Jerry Wind and
Arvind Ranagswamy

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