Question

With marketers increasingly adopting more and more refined market segmentation schemes - fueled by the internet and other customization efforts - some critics claim that mass marketing is dead while others counter that there is always room for large brands that employ marketing programs targeting the mass market. However, in today's consumer environment, there may be a back/ash against giant corporations.

Take a Position: Is mass marketing dead OR is mass marketing still a viable way to build a profitable brand.

Please provide viable definitions, detailed reasonings and examples to back your case.

Answer 1

answer...

Mass marketing refers to identifying a market for a particular product and marketing to the whole market without making any further classifications on any basis. Such as a mobile phone manufacturing company if markets its phone to all mobile phone users and potential mobile phone users then it is mass marketing. Thus a seller gets engage in producing, selling and marketing a single product for all buyers.

On the other hand identifying a market then making various classifications into the market on basis of any variable like age, income, race, gender etc. and then marketing to a specific segment is known as segmentation. Such as if the above mobile phone making company classifys the whole market on basis of income and target and market only the segment which earns high income and belong to high income group and designing marketing strategies accordingly is segmenting and targeting.

Nowadays we are witnessing many and huge numbers of suppliers in each industry doing segmentation marketing thus we can say that mass marketing is dead. Although there is still a small room for mass marketing but it is also loosing its grip.

Various reasons aor arguements on the basis of which we can say that mass marketing is dead are as follows:

* Increasingly stiff cut throat competition: no industry, be it batch processing like paints industry or assembly line productions etc , every indsutry is now having severe competion and that competion is increasing day by day. To handle this challenge now producers are segmenting and doing customization to gain a specific share of market.

* Buyers want more for their money: in mass marketing producers provide a single product to all consumers. But now as bargaining powers of buyers ahve increased due to many factors like globalization, consumers are now want more customization from the marketer.

* Different value for different customers: it has been learned realized and accepted by marketers that different componenets of a product holds different value for each consumer. For example a consumer of a wrist watch would value its quality more another may value its brand more another may value its others feature more. Hence to meet the maximum satisfaction of the consumers it has become necessary to customize products.

We have many leading examples such as Porsche doing niche marketing, IKEA doing local marketing, Nike ID doing individual marketing etc.

Let’s take an example of laptop market. The company cannot offer a similar product to all its customers. There are various segments in laptop market kids segment, gamers segment, professional segment, student segment. Each segment will have their own requirement. A company cannot design a single product and sell it to different segments. To increase its sales the company has to take care of each and every segment.

Eg :- Dell is successful band due to its mass customization strategy. It gives the customers power to assemble different hardware and software according to their choice. Customer can place order according to their requirements. They give customers freedom to select the assembly rather than forcing them to buy one which is offered by company.