one thing, that marketers and producers are challenged to find equilibrium between cost of production and distribution and customer satisfaction. It is this equilibrium that "triggers a market transaction" (Taylor and Shaw 32). Additionally, however, it means that a single definition of a consumer is problematic. This explains such concepts as market segmentation, or the "grouping identifiable consumers who possess similar needs and desires" (Taylor and Shaw 58), but the fact is that markets may be segmented across innumerable independent variables. Among the most critical is that "patterns of consumption" (Taylor and Shaw 58) shift in response to both socioeconomic forces (including demographic shifts) and production capacities.
For decades, the most striking social transformation relevant to consumer behavior in the U.S. in the twentieth century was considered to be the widespread increase discretionary income in the U.S. after the Great Depression (Taylor and Shaw 76-81). This idea has been adumbrated by more recent research. Olsen characterizes the transformation of American society from a producer to a consumer culture (245). One aspect of this is the shift from patterns of home-based production of goods to consumer-brand goods from toilet paper to foods distinguished by special packaging and brand names. Aggressive promotion, says Olsen, had the effect of socializing or acculturating customers to become consumers (252ff). Brand preferences in America, indeed, are so strongly embedded into the culture that they can be seen across generations and across class-status lines. Using Updike's Rabbit novels as a benchmark (the novels chart the life and work of an upscale American) Cornwell and Keillor connect overt brand consciousness in the U.S. to a 20th-century tendency toward materialist values in America and to a nexus of brand names and consumer attitudes, the one in part defining the characteristics of the other.
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