Charles Kessler & Associates

A Mass Market?

When the Internet was introduced to businesses last year, it was introduced as a "mass market of 30 million". We all know that the 30 million figure depends on so many variables that it is likely to be both true and false for the measurable future. Unfortunately, even if the 30 million figure is removed, the concept of the Internet as a mass market is still firmly implanted in people's minds.

This mass market fixation is something that older business people and business school professors have been advocating because they are stuck in a rut. The new wave of marketing techniques are target marketing, network marketing and direct marketing. Anyone who chooses to be stuck in the mass marketing mindset is doomed in both cyberspace and the real world.

The Internet has never been a mass market.  

It is important to draw the distinction here between the classical business school definition of mass market (ie a group of buyers that the seller mass-promotes one product to such as Henry Ford's any color car as long as it is black), and the current perceived definition of a large group of people usually 20% of the population or an audience of millions. However, regardless of the definition, "the Internet" is not a mass market.

The new perception of a mass market has evolved because even in the real world the mass market is becoming a thing of the past. The introduction of targeted magazines and cable TV is eroding this a little more every day. Thus people now consider a mass market to be nothing more than a large audience.

"The Internet" is not in any way, shape or form, a single entity. There is no way to reach "the Internet". Reaching out to or communicating with "the Internet" can only be guaranteed to be done by private email which is impossible in this distributed often unlisted medium.

The Internet is the ultimate network of niche or target markets. People congregate in areas where their interests lie. Because of the large amount of data circulating on the Internet, people guard these sanctuaries of interest vigorously. Intrusions of material not pertinent to the interests of the group are beat back with mail bombs, cancelbots, flames and complaints to the offender's ISP.

The home page of places like Yahoo and Excite may be the closest thing to mass markets that on the Internet. This is not to say thatall of the pages of these sites are equally mass market. There are less than 20 web pages on the entire Internet where you can guarantee that even a significant minority of the Internet will visit. 20 pages out of a few million is a pretty small percentage.  

Once the person gets off of the main home page and into a topic area, their minds are fixed on the topic that they may be searching for. Erroneous data such as un targetted advertising banners in these topical areas have limited impact.

Someday the Internet will be fairly standard and have a good portion of the population. After all, 1995 saw the sales of more computer equipment than TVs. Someday there will be a critical mass on the Internet to declare that you really can reach more than a million people in a few targeted markets. Nonetheless, this still won't be a mass market.

The Internet has a remarkable phenomena where once a critical mass is reached a group fragments into a set of subgroups that are even more specific. There used to be one netnews group comp.infosystems.www. There are now 16 or more comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups.

If you are Pepsi or Coca-Cola, this means problems. If you are someone trying to sell Italian shoes, this is a good thing. The more the market fragments, the more targeted things become for you automatically. 

Remember the future of the Internet is agent technology that searches the Net for specific information for us, and filters the incoming information. The more the individual filters or controls on their input, the farther away from the mass market things become.

by Mary Morris