Mass marketing is a marketing strategy where a company promotes or advertises its goods, services or product to a wide scope of audiences. While doing so, the company hopes that the product, service or good will appeal to so many people from which it can tap a market. The era of social media has hit the market with so much magnitude that social marketing has taken up the marketing industry. Many companies are moving to social marketing and forgetting about where they started from and thus the question of whether mass marketing is dead or not.
The universe and hence the business environment, is as dynamic as the age itself. Things are changing rapidly. The advertisements that used to be made on television during prime time, or those covering full magazine pages are no longer the hotcake. They only satisfy the bare minimum requirement. They are actually not enough in the current business environment, whereby the attention of the customers is virtually everywhere, continuously drifting away from the conventional marketing media of the days gone. As the years go by, this reality becomes even more entrenched. Subsequently, mass marketing strives to get a footing in the present competitive business environment.
Mass marketing is not dead yet, but it is on the verge of dying. This is because; most people perceive it as something that takes away their attention-unnecessary evil. Advertising that is unnecessary is what mass media is being perceived as. Mechanisms are being put in place to a marketing strategy that is permission-based rather than interruption based. What this means is that companies engrossed on internet advertise to people what they want to see and whenever they want to see them.
In addition to that, the pioneers of mass marketing or what people consider as interruption based marketing are dying off. The pioneers are newspapers. This is despite the fact that the services they provide are very valuable. As the world advances technologically, the older methods of communication and marketing get extinct. However, these strategies can persist if changes are made to fit the needs of the people in the modern world.
Taking it quite conceptually, mass marketing entails interrupting or disrupting people from their routine. It calls for a great deal of effort and interest for an individual to completely get the attention of another. Similarly, it also calls for a great deal of interest from the targeted individual to give time to such. In a way, it can be termed as soft violence, whereby one strives to arrest the other’s interest. This raises a lot of questions, for example, what if the target audience is so busy with other things. What if the environment of marketing in this context is not friendly for one’s attention to divert?
While looking at it from another perspective, mass marketing entails indiscriminate marketing strategies. It is generalized and targets virtually everyone. With such a random interpretation of target audience, it becomes even more futile, to reach to the people effectively. This is why there is a slow but gradual replacement of mass marketing by permission-based marketing, where there is some degree of trust on the web.
In a nutshell, mass marketing is not dead yet, but it is on the verge of dying. It is in decline, and it can only serve depending on the brand’s context. It still serves a number of purposes, but for it to survive, it has to evolve to keep up with the realities of the modern world.
