I enjoyed watching one of Seth Godin’s presentations and reading his blog over the last few days. He is a well know marketer and has really interesting views on the Mass Market and how marketing to the mass market has changed in recent years. For example, he talks about the “free fall” that television advertising is in and quite a bit about marketing to the edges or fringes of the market curve rather than the middle. Basically, pick up the early adopters, enthusiasts, and evangelists and have them spread the word. Works a lot better than traditional advertising plus it is much more cost effective.
I’ve not really read enough of his work to hear his rational, but in one presentation he describes the market, with the fringes, using a bell curve. I don’t know whether he believes markets look or behave like this or if he is just using the bell curve as an easy way to make his point. Regardless, I don’t think markets look like a bell curve today, and I’m not really sure if the ever did. I do know that Marketers have been using that curve for at least 40 years, and it’s pretty tired.
The reason that marketers have so much trouble marketing to the “proverbial mass market” is because it really no longer exists, at least not in the form understood when the term mass market was originally coined. The mass market of the 21st century looks topographically more like the internet or an airline “hob and spoke system”. Marketing difficulty is further magnified in that this very distributed market, actually demographically redistributes itself every six months or so. Maybe faster.
So hitting a mass market in 1960 with television, when there were less than 10 channels is a little more difficult when we today have greater than 300. Of course, they’re are many other ways to access the TV content that don’t require you to be inundated with countless repetitive commercials. This is turning out to be a huge problem for the TV industry and the advertising industry in general.
TV is only one example. The same issue can be seen in newspapers, billboards, magazines, web advertising, and others. It tells me that the actual underlying methodologies and premise is probably somewhat flawed to fit the demographics and market dynamics of the 21st century.
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