Undifferentiated marketing is a marketing strategy that works as if all consumers have similar tastes and motivations. It is sometimes known as mass marketing. Most marketing falls into three main categories. Undifferentiated advertising treats all consumers the same way. Differentiated advertising involves producing different marketing for specific market segments. Concentrated marketing focuses the entire marketing on only one market segment.
Some of the differences among these types of marketing are disputable. In some definitions, differentiated marketing involves the same product, but marketed in different ways to different market segments. In other definitions, it can cover a company that develops variations on a product to cover these different segments. One example would be a drinks company that developed a low-calorie version of its product to appeal to the health market.
The main benefit of undifferentiated marketing is that it does not require as much focus and research to identify the tastes of individual market sections. It can also mean the company can be confident that it will not miss out any potential consumers in its marketing. This strategy makes sure marketing reaches people who do not fall into the supposed target market but would still be interested in buying.
Undifferentiated marketing can also be suitable for a product or service that is intended to be profitable based on quantity of sales rather than high mark-ups or a high price. This often applies to products that meet common needs such as food, clothing or transport. If carried out successfully, undifferentiated marketing can lead to a product being so well-established that it dominates a market and even becomes synonymous with that market.
The main drawbacks of undifferentiated marketing are that it can lose focus and be wasteful. By keeping a marketing message very general, it may be harder to resonate with customers. The product may appear more generic and have fewer clear advantages over rivals in the same market.
Unless a product fulfills very general needs, undifferentiated marketing can also mean a lot of money and effort goes towards reaching an audience with little or no interest in the product. One example would be an airline that only sold one class of ticket and marketed itself based on flights to resort destinations. This would likely be unsuccessful to business flyers who had different needs to vacation travelers. It would also fail to appeal to flyers who wanted a "no-frills" service where low prices was the key.