Compare and contrast local and individual marketing

What will be an ideal response?

Local marketing involves tailoring brands and promotions to the needs and wants of local customer groups — cities, neighborhoods, and even specific stores. Advances in communications technology have given rise to new high-tech versions of location-based marketing. Local marketing has some drawbacks, however. It can drive up manufacturing and marketing costs by reducing the economies of scale. It can also create logistics problems as companies try to meet the varied requirements of different regional and local markets. Still, local marketing helps a company to market more effectively in the face of pronounced regional and local differences in demographics and lifestyles. In contrast, individual marketing involves tailoring products and marketing programs to the needs and preferences of individual customers. Individual marketing has also been labeled one-to-one marketing, mass customization, and markets-of-one marketing. Today, new technologies are permitting many companies to return to customized marketing. More detailed databases, robotic production and flexible manufacturing, and interactive communication media such as cell phones and the Internet have combined to foster mass customization. Mass customization is the process by which firms interact one-to-one with masses of customers to design products and services tailor-made to individual needs.