What Is Mass Marketing? Applying Mass Marketing in Practice

If you want to reach a large number of customers at a low cost per contact, Mass Marketing may be the right solution for you. So What is Mass Marketing? And how is Mass Marketing applied in practice? Join Mona Media in exploring mass marketing in the article below.

What is Mass Marketing?

The concept of Mass Marketing

Mass Marketing, also called mass-market advertising, is a marketing strategy that aims to attract the entire market rather than a specific target group. It suits common products or services that everyone in society needs, such as soap and detergent.

Typically, with this approach a business uses mass media to reach as many people as possible. Through it, they can supply the products they make to every customer segment.

History of Mass Marketing

The concept of Mass Marketing first appeared in 1920. At that time the only media used for this strategy was radio. Even so, quite a few businesses succeeded with mass marketing.

From then, the mass marketing movement quickly became popular and grew strongest in the 1940s and 1950s. By the early 20th century, consumer goods manufacturers kept using Mass Marketing to promote their products and succeeded in creating an extremely large market.

Today, as digital technology grows strongly and gradually replaces traditional media such as TV, radio and newspapers, Mass Marketing is applied on online media platforms so that businesses can reach target customers in the market.

Pros and cons of Mass Marketing

Advantages

• A very large target customer base: Mass Marketing is a strategy to attract the whole market, so it focuses on sales volume along with low product prices. The target audience of this campaign is therefore very wide.
• Low cost: With mass marketing, businesses can reach every kind of customer, so the cost per contact is lower. The advertising cost is also much lower than niche marketing.
• Large-scale product advertising reach: The media used in this strategy are the most popular mass media today, so the advertising reach for goods is always large. Consumers can quickly pick up the information.
• Accurate interaction and feedback: The main purpose of Mass Marketing is interaction between the business and its target customers. Marketers running this strategy usually use product promotion solutions and marketing tools so that consumers see the product as different (though in reality there is not much difference).

Disadvantages

• Low adaptability: The disadvantage of Mass Marketing is that businesses find it hard to change products to suit the tastes or specific needs of individual consumer groups.
• Low profit margins: Companies usually set a low price on their products in order to attracting customers. For the same reason, the market tends to see these products as low in value.
• High competitive pressure: The mass market can attract many more customers, but it also makes competition between businesses ever more intense.

Beyond that, customer loyalty for a product is also fairly low. If a product is only cheap and has no standout features compared with competitors, it cannot hold on to customers for long, and they will quickly move to a better product.

How is Mass Marketing applied in practice?

As mentioned, Mass Marketing is used to reach and attract as many customers as possible. It also raises awareness of the business through its product or brand image.

In practice, Mass Marketing is used very widely, especially in consumer goods and everyday necessities such as medicine, food, toilet paper, toothpaste, soft drinks and transport.

Healthcare and legal service providers have also adopted this mass marketing approach quite often.

Channels for Mass Marketing

Because a mass marketing campaign targets the whole market, advertising has to run across many online and offline channels to succeed. The most common channels include social media, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, promotional emails,…

Online, businesses produce videos and buy TV ad slots, or run ads on YouTube, Facebook and high-traffic websites during peak hours. Offline, they can buy billboards of various sizes and place them in busy areas to attract customers.

A typical example is McDonald’s, which advertises its fast food everywhere through many channels: posters on buses, outdoor billboards, TV ads and radio. The company has used this strategy for many years. As a result, it reaches a huge number of customers and has become one of the leading companies in the global fast food industry.

Common Mass Marketing strategies

Market penetration

The first strategy is market penetration, which aims to reach the target customer base. A business can carry it out in 3 ways:

• Encourage customers to buy more of the product.
• Turn competitors’ customers into your own customers.
• Pay attention to people in your current customer group who are still undecided.

Market expansion

When the current market is saturated, expanding into new markets is essential. Businesses have to find new markets to enter and new customers for their products.

Many well-known companies, in Vietnam and abroad, use this strategy. For example, Samsung has looked for new markets in many countries, including Vietnam, to expand its business.

Product development

Besides expanding the market, businesses also need plans to develop their products, improving quality and adding more features.

To carry out this strategy, a company’s product development team plays a very important role. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are foreign companies that do this well, and in Vietnam examples include Milo and Ovaltine.

Product diversification

In mass marketing, product diversification means developing more new products for new markets. A business usually follows this strategy when it sees potential opportunities that suit it outside the market it currently operates in.

Every marketing strategy has its own strengths and weaknesses. So before adopting any strategy, study its characteristics and how it is carried out, and check that it fits your industry, product or service.

That covers the Mass Marketing strategy. We hope this information helps you understand the strategy better, so you can choose approaches that help your business succeed.