How has diversity impacted marketing?

Marketing takes a product and tries to identify the customer it will most likely appeal to, or that the manufacturer or provider want it to appeal to, and then to address that target customer with messages that are meaningful to them. The more diverse the market place -age, sex, ethnicity, region of the country, etc., the greater the challenge to address the specific life styles and attitudes of each segment and to target the message accordingly. It is a very difficult task with huge financial consequences to getting it wrong. Getting the right message to a mixed demographic can be a real creative trick. Think about Steven Tyler doing Burger King commercials. Get the message they're sending? And to whom?

The other marketing diversity is the emerging vehicles used to send your message. We used to count on radio, TV, newspaper and magazines. Now the internet has hundreds of effective sites. Cable TV has taken a major chunck of ad dollars away from network TV. Newspaper and the Yellow Pages are struggling and failing to compete.

Product diversity among similar items, like phones, makes getting out the message at the speed of changes in technology another challenging impact on marketing.

That's what diversity can do to marketing, and that's just for starters.