The “Mass Market” doesn’t exist anymore.

An exploration of the end of mass-market economics, driven by technology and digital.

The early stages of the Internet were much like the early stages of society.

First, you had a period of lawlessness. You could only seriously talk to and transact with those who you were close to. Then small pockets of society began to develop. The Yahoo’s of the world were formed, followed by the Bebo’s and Friendster’s. People began to find ways to know who the other person was.

Then governments began to standardise activity. Passports (or in this case, social media accounts) were used to identify people properly and verify their identities. It became easier to find out exactly who you were dealing with.

And silently, off the back of these changes, marketplaces began to get bigger. People were able to deal with others all across the world. Companies became vehicles for people to interact with one another en-masse, fuelled by governments who could regulate their various transactions.

It’s no stretch to imagine the governments of the Internet as Google, Facebook, and the companies as Uber, Airbnb. The Internet has been one of the first truly ‘self-regulating’ environments we’ve seen to date.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s explained by the structure of the Internet. Previously, in the world, it was very hard to transfer information people. It cost time and money. Both of these things made information less relevant and important as it spread throughout various people.

But online information is in full free-flow. You can see how viral content changed from pre-Internet to post-Internet here. The long and short of it was information was a ‘physical’ thing. When the Internet made it electrical, it became instant and free to transfer. Suddenly information about everything everywhere was possible.

This structure meant it was easier for people to tell others when something was wrong, simpler for groups to organise en-masse and convenient for people to verify information. It’s a revolution in how people understand the world around them — no surprises there.

The web quickly evolved to provide ‘definitive’ sources of this information. Facebook, for example, evolved as your Internet birth certificate. Twitter quickly became the authority for understanding the news cycle. And you had other platforms like LinkedIn evolve to provide a verified CV.

This information was never was accurate as the real world — mostly because it lacked any stringent regulation — but for it’s purpose, it was good enough. It acted as a repository of information that explained and defined who and what people were. Before the Internet, it was simply too expensive and difficult for any one player to control something like this, but when information becomes free and easy to push around, that gave rise to all of these platforms.

Traditionally in the world, brands were an extension of the human concept of ‘reputation’. In the same way a title in the real world (e.g a Bachelor’s degree) denoted some form of quality of the candidate you were employing, brands denoted some form of quality/assurance/perception of the product you were buying. People gravitated to brands because they provided security for their purchase and guaranteed certain pieces of satisfaction.

Buy an Audi, you’re marked down as having a decent amount of money. Buy a Toyota Minivan you know you’re getting a decent car you can take the kids around in. Buy a house in a certain suburb and you know what type of neighbours you should have. The list goes on and on. And it reveals something pretty intrinsic about human behaviour. When we purchase something, we’re also trying to purchase the security that goes alongside it.

With most services we used to rely on a brand to guarantee that security. Take the taxi industry. We knew all drivers had been through a process, were quite regulated, and they would pick us up and take us somewhere for a standardised price. We’d minimise our issues and never be confused about who in the world was meant to collect us at a given time. It simplified the exercise.

But then along came Uber. The incredible thing no one at Uber wants to admit is it probably could never have existed without Facebook first. Facebook gave them a central point of identity to work from (which they translated into offline identity checks). Whilst you could still sign up without an account, the underlying ‘social principle’ of the web allowed Uber to exist. Suddenly you didn’t actually need to know the person who was going to pick you up. They didn’t need to go through stringent licensing checks, or have a distinctive brand of car. Why? Technology could instantly transfer specific identifying information to you both in an instant.

For customers that suddenly meant that every transaction, rather than being the same, could have a number of different elements to it. A different car, a different driver, different pickup location. For drivers it meant they never had to wait/hunt around for people that trusted them already — the app could identify and bridge that trust for them.

In a sense, Uber’s product isn’t peer to peer lifts at all. It’s facilitating trust between the two providers of those services, and creating a system to provide quality assurance around that.

The same thing happened in the hotel industry. Previous to Airbnb people used hotel brands as a marker of a certain quality and standard of room. Airbnb completely turned that on it’s head: suddenly users were able to access verified information about each other, using Airbnb as the verification point. Airbnb’s brand is as much about assuring the quality of each party to one another as it is about it’s own service.

This change drives a shift to our own economies. Prior to information being networked and everywhere we needed brands as markers of reputation and therefore trust. This drove larger conglomerates who could scale services via processes and ways of doing things, simply because that was the easiest way to guarantee a result. But today that’s all changing.

Today, platforms can provide that trust. If you’ve got a process to connect two people who can provide a service you don’t actually need the product. You’re just the facilitator of ‘network’ information in a certain sector.

From there, you can see how marketing breaks down. Services become more personalised, individuals demand different value propositions and it becomes critical to provide information that serves specific needs rather than mass markets. Needs might be grouped across the web, but because you have infinite information, you no longer rely on one message to make a judgement. You rely on five hundred.

That makes marketing faster, more agile and more responsive as it struggles to keep up with, well, people.

And therein lies the true evolution that the networked economy has given us: it’s slowly but surely eating the concept of mass market products and services. That’s a fundamental shift in the way that we buy and discover products more profound than perhaps anything we’ve ever seen before. It requires us to behave in a different manner when we interact with people, because people can always access new information.

Consumption and production of goods will become more personalised and peer to peer, and technology platforms will fuel that interaction going forward.

There’s no better example of this than in the services industries. TechCrunch, in a fantastic piece, called this evolution “market networks”. They essentially saw information in a network, combined with a required transaction, forming an intelligent marketplace that could connect people (and disrupt traditional businesses who owned this space e.g event planning companies). Production of something now became about connecting two service providers who could work together, rather than finding a company who already had those two service providers.

So, what’s next? Here are a few predictions…

Manufacturing is about to get smaller. I’ve previously written about how additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) will kill China and it’s true. The networked economy combined with 3D printing will mean the next phase of manufacturing will be about swapping, and marketing, designs, more than anything.

Platforms will dominate the services industries. If you’ve bought a service brand, chances are you’ve used them simply to mitigate the cost of finding/vetting multiple professionals. Technology will start to take this role over from humans (and big, clunky brands) more and more.

Marketing is about to get more content driven. More and more it will become about understanding a wide range of consumer needs, and automating how you communicate about your product to those consumers. What that means in practice is building efficient paths to acquisition (how do I get access to customers), finding ways to drive smaller and more frequent messages to them and anticipating points where they’ll be receptive to sales messages. A good example of this is the Optus performance marketing program — which only marketed to people with direct response messaging after they were 20 months into a phone contract.

But above all, the networked economy has given us understanding. That means smaller, more nimble marketplaces as we can find all the information we need about a product or service instantly. And it means that bigger is not always better.

Welcome to the end of the mass market economy.