Selectivity and Segmentation

          New time are upon us. The traditional idea of the mass market, on which so many American business fortunes were built, is dying a gradual death. It may even be a complusive death. With fits and starts and occasional dramatic profits, it is still with us, but not, in the traditional sense, for long. It is being replaced by a new kind of market dominated by a new and powerfully different kind of consumer.
           The age of the indiscriminate mass consumer is in its twilight. We are rapidly entering an age of the discriminating consumer whose ambition is not to ''keep up with the Jonesess'' but to ''keep away from the Joneses.'' becoming a symbol of democratic affluence. They are becoming a symbol of mass-market anonymity, of deadening uniformity.
       For a good many  years to come, business success will depend less in an executive's capacity to think big and more on his capacity to think small-more correctly, to think selectively. He must stop thinking of his customers s part of some massively homogeneous market. He must start thinking of them as numerous small islands of distinctiveness, each of which reqires its own unique strategies in product policy, in promotional strategy, in pricing, in distribution methods, and in direct-selling techniques.
       An aggressively think-small attitude produced such enormous successes as Pepperidge Farm bread, Caedmon records, Early American cake mixes, compact cars and sporty personal cars, personal calculators, and even M&M candy. Enormous opportunity and profit await the company begins more aggressively to think small. And this applies most urgently to America's largest corporations, who seem so often to be so firmly married to the think-big formulas that produced such unmatched greatness in the past. For them, an unbending think-big attitude may be the surest road to ruin.
       In a world of system selling and broadly encompassing definitions of what an industry is, it is time we look again at the details of how the world now works.