What Is an Example of Mass Marketing?

Lee Coursey/CC-BY-2.0

When a company engages in mass marketing, it chooses to overlook differences among the various segments in its market and instead to appeal to the entire market with one uniform strategy or offer, and one example is the Coca-Cola television ads that appear during the winter holidays. The polar bears cavorting and drinking Coca-Cola are designed to appeal to just about everyone, and because Coca-Cola is a product that spans different niches in terms of popularity, this is a campaign that has proved successful over time.

Marketing is still a fairly new concept in the history of commerce, but mass marketing is even newer, with its beginnings coming in the 1920s as mass radio usage came about. For the first time, companies had the ability to reach a large audience with a wide variety of possible customers. Marketing efforts prior to this time had focused on variety spots, as print publications had been targeted toward specific sub-populations.

Mass marketing waned a bit during the Great Depression, although it came back and expanded further in the boom years of the 1940s and 1950s, and beginning in the 1980s, it took on the mammoth status it still has, creating a gargantuan potential market for companies with lower costs as a result.

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