Mass marketing is dead

Mass marketing is dead. But very few people realize it. The way to reach people now is through widespread pinpoint marketing. The old paradigm has been that you design your initial message to attract as many people as possible, and then some of those people will filter through and become customers. Then you try to get that message to as many people as you can afford to. But people are now getting so many of these generic messages that they no longer respond to them. But now, with instantaneous communication technology available to anyone, there is a better way. Let your initial message do its own filtering. Design your message so that it appeals only to a narrowly defined market, but make it so unique that it is almost impossible for the "right person" to ignore. Then send it out wide and often. Most people will completely ignore it, but the people it is intended for will lock on to it.

This is especially true with online advertising. Many of the messages I see are sorely lacking in detail. Things like "make money with your computer," "the best opportunity in decades" -- generic messages with no unique content. These may attract a few responses but I doubt that they are very effective at bringing in business. People see the opportunity to advertise on AOL and think "Wow--a cheap way to mass market." But that's not what it is at all. Online advertising offers the advertiser the opportunity to direct a unique, information-rich message to a narrowly selected audience. That's where the real power is.

Communication capacity is becoming cheap and abundant. And that portends a dramatic change in the advertising approach.

In the old days, the days of newspapers printed with cold type, telephone company monopolies, the days when the only video was broadcast, when urgent documents were delivered by bicycle, it made sense to husband your communication resources. This is the outdated model on which most advertisers continue to operate. The idea was -- if you're going to spend a lot of your resources to communicate with the market, then you better make sure you reach as many people as possible. The inevitable result of this thinking has been advertising that has minimal information content and is produced to the "lowest common denominator." Meaningless hyperbole, lack of content and depth, over-generalizations, reliance on ambiguous imagery -- these things have infected all advertising. The result has been that consumers no longer respond to it. They've seen it all before. They don't believe it. It's nothing new, just the same old meaningless hype.

But wait. Something has changed dramatically. The cost of communication is plummeting. The availability of communication bandwidth is exploding. For the effective advertiser, the strategy is shifting. Now, in order to be effective, you need to be wasting communication capacity. It is cheap and plentiful. Send out detailed, in-depth information as far and wide as you can. Most of it will be completely ignored by most people, but you will be able to make a powerful presentation to the people that are interested. There is one very important caveat. You must make your information available without making it intrusive. Don't annoy people to death by electronically shipping them megabytes of details unless you are certain they want to have them.

And that is really the skill involved in advertising in this age of cheap communications. Knowing how to make your material appealing to your target audience. You must learn to be compelling, convincing and credible. Forget about shouting trite little slogans. Concentrate on making a solid argument for your case.

The new reality of telecommunications gives marketers an unprecedented opportunity to deliver high quality messages that stand out from the crowd. Network marketers in particular can profit by seizing this opportunity.

--Ralph Marston