One-to-One Marketing is the process that identifies your best customers and allows you to get to know them, which enables you to gather information to identify their specific needs and preferences, and then supply them with products and services they want and need to create a lifetime customer.

In reading the history of One-to-One Marketing, one learns how it is totally different from mass marketing. It is the development of a single market of one customer at a time, made possible by computer-controlled customized production, individualized distribution, and customer interaction.

One-to-One Marketing is the difference between seeking a greater market share (working to increase the number of actual customers that use your product or service) and seeking a greater share of customer (working to increase the dollars spent on your products and services by your existing customers), which is building a business by concentrating on individual customers. The philosophy is that it is more cost efficient to keep your current customers than creating new customers.

The History of One-to-One Marketing

The late 19th and early 20th centuries represented a time when business owners knew their customers on a first-name basis. It was not uncommon for an owner of the general store to contact individual customers to inform them that new goods they had been waiting for had arrived at the store.

This was a time when doctors made house calls and the blacksmith at the local livery knew when it was time for your horses to be reshoed. Business owners knew their customers on a first-name basis, knew their families and had a life-long business relationship.

This personalized type of business changed with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of large corporations, employing thousands of people to mass-produce goods on production lines, allowed prices to come down, dramatically making products and services more affordable for the masses.

As a result, mass marketing evolved to promote the purchase of products that were mass-produced. Customers needed to be drawn to locations to purchase those items and the rise of multimedia mass marketing was born. The mass-marketing effort was dictated by the manufacturers and what products they would mass-produce.

As technology evolved and the Information Age began, new media technology happened. Media innovations such as interactivity and individual addressability of customers would take the tradition of mass marketing to a new level of one-to-one marketing.

A new model for marketing, based not on the mass markets but on markets of one customer at a time, was born. This would be made possible through computer-controlled, assembly-line customized production coupled with individualized distribution and addressable, interactive commercial media.

The successful network marketing home business of the future will one that is a dynamic and innovative product brokerage and internet marketing company specializing in One-to-One Marketing and Mass Customization. The company will market a wide variety of high quality, market-driven products and services through a system of Independent Distributors.