Thursday, August 28, 2008

Mass market and direct selling.

Direct selling, eptiomized by the door-to-door sales of Fuller brushes, insurance, vacuum cleaners, etc. would be inappropriate for mass market products as it is labour intensive, labour is costly, time consuming, and expensive as described by our text. Instead distributors and retailers are employed to market and sell mass market products. For example, "The Dollar Store" provides hundreds of mass market products which could not be direct marketed individually without incurring costly losses. The advent in Korea of travelling "Porters" diesel pick-up trucks which often stake out a corner of an apartment complex and lay out a carpet of dollar stock products for a few hours, would be the closest example to direct marketing of mass consumer products I have seen however it still represents a distributor or short-term retail sales scenario. Advertising and marketing the latest dollar store corkscrew or disposable razors set would require a new market segmentation and would not match user or price categories. Imagine if each item you possibly purchased at Walmart within the last month had a full advertising campaign associated with it? This explains why we cannot buy road-worthy cars for a dollar. Yet.

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