No More Mass Market

Dave’s right about Henry. We had this one convo at night and Henry’s solution to everything is, the world needs Jesus. It’s like he wants to be John or something. What happened to this guy? Too bad he’s a flaming racist. I’m pretty sure “Negro” isn’t an acceptable term anymore, Henry. Not to mention your other terms.

I read a fascinating article recently about the death of the mass market. Before, companies used to just blindly market to everyone, the “mass market”. That kinda worked because like, for example, there were just 3 TV networks, so you could reach tons of people through just a few ads. Nowadays, there are so many media outlets that the market is fractured. Tons of cable networks, tons of magazines, whatever, they all kind of represent a market segment.

So companies don’t think about a monolithic market anymore but carefully aim their advertising at particular segments. Beer companies of course advertise heavily on sports. But there’s some surprising things. Like McDonald’s focuses heavily on Latino markets, I guess on Spanish TV or something, apparently because Latinos in America tend to be lower-income, and lower-income families tend to buy more fast food.

Big companies like Procter and Gamble have tons of overlapping brands, carefully targeting each toward particular segments. Every single brand is targeted, there is no mass-market brand.

I dunno, I thought that was really interesting. Kind of points to the fracturing of society a bit. But I’m more interested in implications for the church. I dunno, my personal belief at the moment is that I’m OK with having tons of different churches that can reach out to different segments of society. Asian-American churches, Gen-X churches, whatever, I’m down with all that. I think diversity should be valued in the Church, but I dunno how much it’s necessary for every single church. Course this is all predicated on each church reaching society. If that doesn’t happen, I suppose there’s not much point.