What was the purpose of mass marketing in 1920?

The purpose of mass marketing in 1920 was exactly the same as at any other time in history: to sell as much as possible. The idea is simply to tell as many people as possible about your product or service on the very logical theory that the more people you tell, the more products you'll sell.

Mass marketing needs to involve goods or services used by and attractive to a wide cross-section of the population. Its products must be reasonably low-priced , and, of course, able to be mass-produced.

In the 1920s products such as cigarettes and tobacco, soap and other cleaning products, beauty preparations, and so on, were the focus of many major campaigns.

The 1920s was a notable decade for mass marketing because the widespread ownership of or access to popular radio made indiscriminate - that is, largely untargeted - advertising possible on a scale never previously imagined.

Earlier mass marketing campaigns featured flyers - printed advertising material distributed by various methods - and newspaper advertising. Posters, signs and sandwich-boards were other forms of mass marketing.

Today, television, the internet, radio and the print media are the mainstays of mass marketing, with the once hugely popular junk mail - indiscriminate letterbox drops of flyers - now rapidly declining, along with telemarketing.

The availability of targeted lists caused telemarketing, originally intended as a mass marketing tool, to become increasingly focused. While initially successful, telemarketing fell quickly out of favor with its targets - the buying public - through misuse and lack of voluntary regulation. While people complain about their evening being interrupted by television advertising, few viewers actually mute the volume during commercial breaks; the telemarketing industry assumed this principle would hold good for phone calls, but the public didn't see it that way. Modern telemarketing now involves text messages and emails.