What Is the Meaning of Mass Market?
The term mass market refers to a large, undifferentiated market of consumers with widely varied backgrounds. Products and services needed by almost every member of society are suited for the mass market. Such items as electric and gas utilities, soap, paper towels and gasoline, for example, can be advertised and sold to almost anyone, making them mass market goods.
Throughout the history of the world, businesses have traditionally served very small geographic markets. The size of a business’s target markets were generally limited to the range of the entrepreneur’s personal mode of travel.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, advances in transportation such as railways and automobiles opened up the door for mass merchandiser distribution. In the 1920s, radio broadcasts made it possible for companies to send advertising messages to large, undifferentiated audiences at once, giving birth to the mass market concept and the first mass marketing techniques.
Businesses can reach the mass market with advertising messages through a variety of media. Radio, as mentioned above, is the oldest mass market medium. Television quickly took a dominant role as the mass medium of choice of a large number of businesses. Television remained the most effective means of reaching mass market audiences until innovations in technology and the Internet began to change the game around the turn of the 21st century.
Newspapers are also a traditional mass market medium, although not as effective as radio or television due to the regional or biased nature of individual publications. The coming of the digital age revolutionized marketing strategy.
The main advantages of advertising to and serving the mass market are the scope and cost-efficiency of doing business on such a large scale. Advertising messages broadcast over mass media can reach millions of viewers in a single showing, and economies of scale make mass distribution cheaper than regional deliveries.
Despite their advantages, mass markets feature a significant weakness. Advertising or distributing niche products for unique market segments in the mass market can be extremely expensive compared to the impact achieved.
Running an advertisement for investment banking services on a major television network, for example, could be an enormous waste of money, since the vast majority of network viewers are not business owners looking to incorporate their companies. Mass marketing also fails to deliver the personalized experience that customers have come to expect, Marketing Insider Group notes.
Increasingly precise market segmentation is the antidote to yesterday’s mass marketing’s inherent weakness. According to Leadspace, big data has played a pivitol role in solving the problem of overly broad, unsegmented marketing outreach. Data analytics allows companies to pinpoint their target audience and craft personalized messages tailored to their customers.
Traditional media such as magazines, websites and billboards still have their place. Marketers can use data to target specific demographics and geographic regions at a lower cost than mass market media. Markets can be segmented according to a number of factors, including psychology, buying behavior, demographics, income, region and other niche market examples.