End of the Mass Market

During the late year 1990s, we witnessed death of the concept of the mass market. Regardless, some of the marketers continue to argue that database marketing will never replace mass marketing for most of the products. The view is that communicating with users by e-mail, mail, Web site, telephone, or fax will never become cost-efficient sufficient to justify the return. Although, the success of Internet provides considerable evidence that one-to-one marketing is /will be suitable for many packaged goods and other high- and low-involvement products that in past sold almost entirely with brand advertising.

Through the year 1970s, only high-end retailers and personal-service firms could afford to practice one- to-one marketing. For most part, they did it old-fashioned way with personal selling and index-card files.

During the year 1990s, supermarkets, bookstore chains warehouse clubs, and even restaurants began to track specific purchase transactions to build their "share of the customer." Many programs now run on workstation environments or Personal Computers platforms much more powerful than the most capable mainframes of the year 1970s. It is possible nowadays to track 5 or 6 million customers for the same real cost as tracking a single customer in year 1950. Through Internet-based databases and remote access, this capability literally has exploded in last few years.

The  situation  will  become  even  more  interesting  since  one-to-one  marketing  becomes  even increasingly pervasive. Through an increasingly powerful array of much more efficient, separately interactive vehicles, options are virtually unlimited, by including on-site interactivity, fax-response, Web site connections, e-mail, and interactive television.

Most households nowadays either have direct Internet access, or through TV sets that also provide real- time interactivity through the Internet. We are closing quickly on the time where particular will interact with their television and/or computer easily by speaking to it.   Via many Web sites, computers work for us to enable us to remember transactions and preferences and discover just the right entertainment, products, information and services. Similarly, online capabilities enable providers to anticipate what a consumer may want today or in future. Unluckily, the system has been slower to protect consumers from commercial intrusions that they cannot find relevant or interesting.