Think of marketing as a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum you have mass marketing -- advertising in Time Magazine, on the Super Bowl -- designed to reach as many people as possible. With mass marketing, you don't particularly care who you reach, your goal is just to repeatedly get your message in front of warm bodies. This kind of marketing is relatively inexpensive on a per-exposure basis. You pay tens of millions of dollars for ads on the Super Bowl, and you reach hundreds of millions of people. However, this type of marketing is not particularly effective on an individual basis. You have to reach a lot of people for even a single sale to be made.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have one-on-one marketing, where the manufacturer directly markets to the end consumer. That has traditionally been very expensive on a per-exposure basis. The payoff is that one-on-one marketing is much more effective than anything else.
What cyberspace does is make the highly targeted, one-on-one marketing possible, with the reach and the economies of scale of mass marketing. Imagine the potential of that. In the traditional marketing spectrum, you had to chose between reaching a lot of people (mass marketing) and reaching the right people (target marketing). Cyberspace makes possible a powerful hybrid form of marketing -- mass target marketing. How is this possible?
Mass target marketing is made possible by interactivity. And interactivity simply means that the market is able to "talk back" to the marketers, to interact with the marketing message.
Television as we now know it is interactive only to a very limited degree. If we don't like something, we interact by turning it off or switching to another channel. The problem is, there is a tremendous delay between when we interact and when the marketer knows of our interaction. If we don't like a commercial, we don't buy the product. If we'd rather see our toothpaste green instead of red, we have no way of informing the manufacturer of that other than not buying the red toothpaste.
Magazines are not that interactive, either. You can turn the pages, throw it away, not buy the products advertised, write a letter to the editor. All produce very slow feedback to the advertiser.
Cyberspace makes possible a continuing dialogue between marketer and market, and that is where the power of the medium lies. It also makes it easy for people to obtain information on demand.
© 1995 Ralph S. Marston, Jr. All rights reserved.