Take a position Mass marketing is dead versus mass marketing

Take a position: Mass marketing is dead versus mass marketing is still a viable way to build a profitable brand. Discussion-with marketers increasingly adopting more and more refined market.

Solution

Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs, (Kotler, 2002) or even in simpler words, that is done to attract and retain customer at a profit. Thus, we see marketing management as the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value (Kotler, 2012). This simple definition tells that marketing is basically reaching out & retaining more and more customers.

Internet no doubt in any part of the world is an important place for advertising and marketing. Many companies are using Internet to understand people’s tastes & preferences. Primarily Google and Facebook are being used by many companies to figuring out what people like best and thus are allowing companies to target their marketing in very specific ways. This is why these companies are looking into what people surf for on the Internet.So from this perspective, mass marketing looks like a dinosaur.

The widespread penetration of fast internet connections, smartphones and social media may lead us to believe that advertising on traditional mass media has become a waste of money.We’re witnessing a mass trend toward customization in marketing, aided by new software packages, social media and other technology.

However we cannot completely refrain from the fact that Internet is not perfect for marketing. This is especially true in more condensed urban areas. In these contexts, it would not be realistic to target one segment of the population. More importantly, we need to realize that the world is becoming more urban. In light of this mass marketing will still be important.

Traditional mass marketing hasn’t gone away, either. Marketers won’t stop trying to reach large swaths of consumers in broad geographical areas any time soon, and they’ll probably continue using some of the same methods for doing so. I think a better approach is to say that mass marketing is becoming less important, but certainly it\'s not dead. So if to we were to take a stand today in 2016, I would say that mass marketing has not died.

Example: If you are buying TV audience at £5 per 1000 reaching 20m viewers five times then yes, it is going to cost £500,000 – but you will have delivered your message to a huge chunk of the UK population in a medium that builds brand credibility like no other. The issue is not simply the overall cost of the activity, but whether or not the activity is delivering the brand or sales shifts required. Unfortunately, not many of mass marketing’s critics understand how this type of value works. It costs a tiny fraction of 1p to reach a consumer for 30 seconds on TV. How many of them realise that TV can be less expensive on a unit of audience basis than many online display, search or affiliate channels?

With new technologies (such as database mining tools) having become available to marketers in recent years, target demographics can be reached more efficiently (and cheaply) than ever before. As such, the total cost per viewer, and ultimately the total marketing cost per sale have decreased significantly.However one needs to understand that completely doing away with mass marketing is not possible atleast at this point of time, where majority of the growth is trade led, and east Asian countries have only been able to have an economy because of mass marketing and a trade based growth. So considering an overview of today\'s age we can conclude that we need both mass marketing and targeted marketing!