ndustrial production:
Marketing is the process of a society by which the demand structure or the desire for economic goods and services is anticipated or enlarged and satisfied through the conception, promotion, exchange, and physical distribution of such goods and services."
The marketing process has the effect of adding value (whether monetary or social) to a product. Indeed, marketing can be thought of as the dynamic component of a tangible good, to the degree the marketer can identify the point of equilibrium between costs of production and distribution and customer satisfaction, or the customer's "experience" of the product. It is this equilibrium that "triggers a market transaction." In such a dynamic situation, identifying market attributes involves observing patterns of consumption, needs, and wants; however, consumption patterns may be a function of a variety of socioeconomic forces, which operate differently on different groups. To the degree actual customer profiles deviate from marketers' ideal type of customer, the marketing challenge is bound to increase.
Social and economic class are important, as are the educational levels and economic expectations of "classes within classes." Marketing choices that the individual makes may reflect group-related behavior but are also a function of group interaction vis-à-vis information about a product and prevailing wisdom about appropriate use of that product. In the case of marketing hair care products to African Americans, marketers' and consumers' conceptions of ideal body and beauty types illustrate a longtime presumption of white-culture characteristics as being the standard of physical beauty and social and economic success against which nonconforming types are measured: blond, straight hair, blue eyes, slender body image, Eurocentric wardrobe, etc. According to Banks, "hair is a means by which one can understand broader cultural issues," especially if those issues ...