The party’s over folks! We didn’t appreciate it then. But in “the good old days” (say, a few decades ago), marketers had it pretty easy. Customers respected authority figures, and we had a pretty good idea of where to locate these people and how to enlist them to sell for us.
There were just a handful of TV stations – whether ABC, NBC, CBS or BBC One and Two, etc.), some popular radio stations, and large circulation print magazines like Time, Life, Vogue or The Spectator that almost everyone read to learn about the world – and about what to buy.
At that time, we thought of the world in terms of very broad categories. We had First World versus Third World, The Young and The Old, Guys and Dolls, and Our People versus The Other People. As we emerged from the throes of World War II, the marketing machine revved up to provide us with the spoils of prosperity – but without a lot of variations to choose from. There was so much pent-up demand following the deprivations of wartime that people with newly-found money to spend weren’t that picky about the details – and the pressures to conform to what others chose were pretty fierce as well.
Indeed, even decades before WWII, Henry Ford famously boasted that his customers could buy one of his cars in any color they liked, so long as it was black. That one-size-fits-all approach made sense in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when mass production was all about maximizing efficiency and output. And even though this orthodoxy started to loosen up after The Great Depression and then through the post-war years, we remained much more of a cookie-cutter society than we are now (especially since by and large the notion of cultural diversity was still a pipe dream).
Our shift from a monolithic structure to a multilithic one (OK, I made that word up) began to change in the 1950s, as consumer groups began to splinter into smaller and smaller niches. Mass-circulation periodicals like Look and The Saturday Evening Post faded into history, to be replaced by a multiplicity of specialised magazines. Editors discovered that they could better compete by helping advertisers to reach more finely defined audiences with specific needs and tastes.
By 2006, the Magazine Publishers of America trade organisation listed more than 40 special categories of consumer magazines – and that doesn’t even count professionally-oriented periodicals. Cable TV stations, internet radio and other upstart outlets also proliferated. Bruce Springsteen’s famous lament about the quality of TV programming in his 1992 song entitled "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" seems quaint today, when even adding a zero to this number doesn’t capture the full range of channels available to us (many still with nothin’ on, but that’s another story).
Creative destruction is a good thing
That monolithic strategy just doesn’t wash in a world where tranquilised consumers are waking up and shaking those cages. Today, many of us no longer accept the labels marketers assign to us, and with good reason. We just don’t conform to the assumptions they make about what we do, think and buy. There’s a bit of a consumer revolution afoot.