The Vanishing Mass Market

To most of us, Tide is as familiar as home. Last year, Americans bought some $2 billion worth of Tide, which has ranked as the country's biggest-selling laundry detergent ever since Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) took it national in 1949. If ever a brand epitomized the great, one-size-fits-all mass market, it is Tide, right? Wrong. Or so says Procter & Gamble itself. James R. Stengel, P&G's global marketing officer, insists that his company's bulging portfolio of big brands contains "not one mass-market brand, whether it's Tide or Old Spice" -- or Crest or Pampers or Ivory. "Every one of our brands is targeted."

In the boom decades after World War II, it was P&G more than any other company that put the mass in marketing, relying on TV commercials and print ads to flog its standardized wares from coast to coast. Along with Coca-Cola (KO ), McDonald's (MCD ), General Motors (GM ), Unilever Group, American Express, and many other consumer-products giants, P&G now is standing mass marketing on its head by shifting emphasis from selling to the vast, anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers. "You find the people. You are very focused on them," Stengel says. "You become relevant to them."