The Death of Mass Marketing
Mass marketing is dead, or so the heads of social media companies would like companies to believe. Social media has transformed the foundation of marketing, introducing new protocols, paradigms, and procedures for targeting consumers. Indeed, consumers are using social media to communicate directly with companies whose brands they support, offering invaluable feedback in a nearly continual discursive loop on Twitter and other apps. Yet “personal marketing,” as Spellings (2009) puts it, is not necessarily the most effective means for all companies to manage their marketing strategy.
Some companies still need to, and do, rely on mass marketing to get across their message to a broad consumer base. Take a company like McDonald’s, which has a target market too diverse for personal marketing to be necessarily of any greater value than mass marketing. Switching from mass to personal marketing would require enormous investments of time and personnel, and might not be as effective either. A similar thing can be said for Apple, which continues to use direct as well as personal marketing for its line of consumer products. The larger the brand, and the more broad its consumer base, the more necessary mass marketing becomes to ensure continued brand management and profitability.
Mass marketing works in favor of the company, not the consumer. As a company-driven form of marketing, it is “based on taking your attention away from what you care about, and redirecting it to something the marketer cares about,” (Whetten, 2009). This is why some companies, and smaller brands, are opting out of mass marketing for a more personalized approach that can build long-term relationships with customers. Companies that cannot afford to use mass marketing will also rely heavily on personal marketing methods. Niche markets are especially likely to benefit from