Idea 33 - Market segmentation There's much blog-talk of the death of the mass market these days. In which case, it has been a long time a-dying. The mass media, cardiograms of the mass market, have been losing viewers and readers since the 1970s - at least in the US, where the mass market was invented. It's true, none the less, that a proliferation of new media has forced the pace of its decline in recent years. And the zoom factor of market segmentation, the opposite of mass marketing, has been closing in on individual consumers with the persistence of a spy satellite. The mass market was created by American companies like Sears Roebuck, DuPont and General Electric, hand in hand with the march of the railroads and the telegraph. It grew rapidly between the 1880s and the 1920s. Mass marketing, on the other hand, only got into its stride from 1920 onwards with the spread of 'sound-receiving devices' - the radio. Television arrived shortly before the Second!