Micromarketing

'Over the past century there have been three changes in the orientation of marketing: distribution, selling and brand management. The Internet is consolidating the fourth stage of marketing's evolution: marketing as managing individual relationships with customers' (Doyle 2000).

Since the heydays of mass marketing in the 1950's, through the decades to the twenty-first century, marketing thought has pushed for smaller and smaller groups of consumers as market targets (Schiller 1989 cited by Goldsmith 1999). Initially the response to meeting customer needs better was market segmentation. Companies brought out an increasing number of product variants to meet the diverse needs of their customers. Media too became more segmented: mass circulation newspapers and magazines were replaced by a number of specialised issues, and the digitisation of technology also facilitated an explosive growth of the number of radio and television channels. The most rapid change results from the revolution ...