It was during the 1950s and 1960s that marketing first came to real prominence. In the 1970s, the focus shifted to techniques for mass marketing within an industry, highlighting techniques or reaching customers on a broad scale. In the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the focus moved on to market segmentation, improving the way that customers in specific markets were identified and reached.
Now the focus has narrowed even further, with technology offering businesses the opportunity for mass personalisation. This is the ability to reach individual customers – targeting the right customers and then fulfilling their market needs – on a massive scale.