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EFFECTIVE MARKETING.
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Discusses marketing as a vital component of a business organization's success.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Discusses marketing as a vital component of a business organization's success. Focus on marketing hair-care products to African Ameican women. Issues of purchasing power and social and cultural forces. Marketing theory and customer profiles. Self-image of black women. Success of Madame Walker who made a fortune from beauty products for women of color.
Paper Introduction:
Introduction
It is commonplace of business-management thought that effective marketing is a vital component of organization success. Internal organizational creativity, pressures of external competitive forces, and the ongoing need to gauge and respond to customer needs and preferences are essential tests of marketing effectiveness, and by extension profitability and company viability. But what companies are selling (say, fast-acting widgets, a tangible good) and what customers are buying (say, an opportunity to save time, an intangible value) may be different. The evolution of modern marketing theory over the course of the 20th century was marked as much by attention to the psychology and sociology of consumers' value judgments and priorities as by attention to mere purchasing power vis-à-vis goods and services.
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Walker (NewYork: Scribner, 2 1), passim. [iv]Ibid., 98. Walker. Introduction It is commonplace of business-management thought that effectivemarketing is a vital component of organization success. Her late assessment ofthe invention was that she had only put together several preexisting itemsin order to create something new and useful for her work, which wasbasically revamped from a pot roast cooker and a hood hair dryer. Louis in 1889,pursuing education and social and financial advancement and becoming awareof the accomplishments of other people of color in the urban setting. [vii]Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Madam's Crusade: A Black Woman's Hair-Care Empire Set a Style and Smashed Barriers," Time 7 December 1998: 165. New York: New York University Press, 2 .Buchman, Rachel. The fact that her hair was golden and not black and hereyes were blue did not make her hair good enough: Good could stand alone. Thefirst black female American millionaire, Mrs. C.J. . To the degree actual customer profilesdeviate from marketers' ideal type of customer, the marketing challenge isbound to increase. . "Exhibit Hails Inventions of African-Americans." Chicago Tribune 18 August 1991: C14.Parsons, Charles. . Such stories aremarked by shifts in the perceptions of standards of beauty on the part ofboth marketers and consumers. . I could pull the kinks out of their hair with a hot comb and oil, then put these pretty curls in with the machine.[xxv]Whatever one's view of the social utility of challenging nature andstraightening the hair of African Americans, the marketing message ofJoyner's invention was that it responded to a felt need among a significantmarket segment in the 192 s and 193 s. [xxviii]Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972),68. Thepatent, granted in 1928, was for a heat-source permanent-hair-wave machineJoyner invented in 1925. Joyner, who owned the firstbeauty shop for black women in Chicago, invented the electric permanent-wave machine as a piece of equipment for the shop. But there are storiesbesides those of consumer-segment self-esteem to be told about theconnection between African Americans' social experience and the marketingof hair-care products over the course of the 2 th century. Interestingly, Parsons suggests that, Joyner did notrealize the marketing implications of the invention. Grier, and P.M. . The fact that so muchmarketing in North America has historically been directed at an ideal typeof customer from dominant-culture groups rather than shaped to address theneeds of discrete customer groups, at least in marketing efforts controlledby dominant-culture actors, suggests that the market was constructed out ofa social ideal, which was itself socially constructed. This would help explain the nexus of cultural assimilation andthe use of straightened hair by such black entertainers as Michael Jackson,Nat King Cole, and Sammy Davis, Jr.[vii] Along the same lines, Middleton-Moz describes the feelings ofinferiority of a black woman who had grown up in a white environment andwho had effectively been obliged by her upwardly mobile family to deny herracial heritage, who was a walking (WASP) fashion plate (and in debtbecause of it), and who eventually acknowledged, "I guess I hide my'blackness' under my expensive suits and makeup." Her family "sufferedtremendous cultural self-hate. [T]his presumption of light skin "good" hair also accounted for the time a new beautician rinsed the soap out of my locks to discover a thickly tangled brown mass instead of the limply obedient curls she'd expected. Cleague's brief memoir of growing up in the 195 s includes an accountof having her hair straightened in a salon for the first time at age eight,of the perils of acrid and skin-burning chemicals for the next 1 years,and of stopping such treatments at the age of 18 in 1968, much to thechagrin of family and boyfriends--all of whom equated "good" hair with"straight" hair. Her focus on'image' had caused her to spend thousands on makeup, hair appointments andclothes."[viii] In other words, in order to defend her buried sense of selfagainst the reality of her selfhood, the young woman had used sociallysanctioned image as a compensating weapon. Walker appears to have more or less ignored accusations of formulatheft; indeed, she duplicated and amplified the sales strategy of Pope-Turnbo. It is clear that in Denver, Walker disengagedherself from Pope-Turnbo--who accused her of stealing the hair-treatmentformula--and launched herself as Madam C.J. We all knew what it meant and we were humble, especially since "good hair" often occurred along with other oppressed- community-defined qualities of beauty, such as lighter-toned skin, sharper features, and, every now and then, the wonder of light eyes. Social and economic class are important, as are the educational levelsand economic expectations of "classes within classes."[iv] Marketingchoices that the individual makes may reflect group-related behavior butare also a function of group interaction vis-à-vis information about aproduct and prevailing wisdom about appropriate use of that product. Walker: First Black Woman Millionaire,"American History Illustrated 24 (1989): 24. [xvii]Ibid. Logan's judgment is pejorative, a comment on the power ofwhite culture to establish standards of beauty. [v]Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women'sConsciousness (New York: New York University Press, 2 ), 4. The emergence of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 195 s and196 s carried with it a reevaluation of the traditional equation in theblack community between "good" or "good enough" hair and white people'shair. Black Rage. . [xxv]Charles Parsons, "63 Years Later, Inventor Glad She Made Waves,Chicago Tribune 3 November 1989: C4. . "An Entrepreneurial Woman-The Daughter of Slaves, Madam C.J. Bundles develops theimportant idea that hair care was an index of social class among blacks inthe 19 s, with well-groomed elite urban blacks looking down on ruralmigrant blacks unsophisticated about grooming, hair care, etc., even assuch figures as Booker T. Her ads relied on black women becoming stronger and more independent rather than white, according to historian Mark David Higbee. The Walkerstraveled extensively to promote the products, including throughout therural South. As Joynerput it late in life: It all came to me in the kitchen when I was making a pot roast one day, looking at these long, thin rods that held the pot roast together and heated it up from the inside. [x]Kay Doyle, "Madam C.J. "She's too light to be growing some shit like this," she hissed to her friend behind the next chair, rolling her eyes in my direction as if I had willed my roots to crinkle just to fuck with her Friday.[xxvi] The difficulty of escaping social pressures of a powerful peer groupappears to be as big as escaping the normative pressures of dominantculture. She and her husband used before-and-after photography ads in blacknewspapers and created a direct-sales organization to market the treatmentproduct as well as a hot comb that straightened black hair. New York: Scribner, 2 1.Cleage, Pearl. Walker: First Black Woman Millionaire. I would jump forjoy!"[xxvii] This "pining" can be interpreted as a residue of marketing andcultural messages delivered over centuries--indeed dating from the early19th century, according to Buchman--that privileged white over blackphysical as well as intellectual features.Conclusion Social definitions are of a piece with marketing strategies, sincedefinition and strategies alike enact and/or construct social realities.The implications of the artifact of "good hair" for African Americans takein a whole range of psychosocial experiences, as Toni Morrison comments inher novel The Bluest Eye: Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. It is unclearwhether the hair treatments she gave to Denver clients were based on herformula or Pope-Turnbo's. 2nd ed. Walker Amassed a Fortune Making and Selling Hair-Care Products." World and I 16 (November 2 1): 233-8.Doyle, Kay. They . BibliographyBanks, Ingrid. The Bluest Eye. . Walker. . Madame Walker was asserting the dominance of black image production by blacks. Equally, better nutrition and hygiene may have been asbeneficial to Walker's hair-care clients as the hair-growth productitself.[xiv] Controversy surrounded the development and marketing of Walker'sproprietary products, according to Bundles.[xv] The controversy was notsolely due to so-called hair politics that have been a feature of AfricanAmerican culture but rather to more mundane industrial concerns. [xxvii]Buchman, 93. [xxvi]Pearl Cleage, "Hairpeace." African American Review 27 (Spring,1993): 38-9. Internalorganizational creativity, pressures of external competitive forces, andthe ongoing need to gauge and respond to customer needs and preferences areessential tests of marketing effectiveness, and by extension profitabilityand company viability. I would love to have my hair like that. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965.Middleton-Moz, Jane. Walker worked as a direct-salesagent for Pope-Turnbo in both St. When Walker began to market ahair-care product that was said to restore hair growth, she declared thatGod had sent the formula to her in a dream. To put it another way,marketing (and the purchasing that may flow therefrom) is as much a socialas a financial phenomenon. (Parsons, 1989). [xxix]Ibid., 1 7. (Cincinnati: South-Western Publishing Company,1969), 4. The preoccupation with having good hair on one hand or of beingable to simulate such hair on the other does not seem to have beeneradicated from black women's consciousness by the social transformationswrought by the midcentury Civil Rights Movement. Especially among AfricanAmerican women of late middle age, there is reported longing or "pining"for Caucasian hair. . Indeed, marketing can be thought of as the dynamiccomponent of a tangible good, to the degree the marketer can identify thepoint of equilibrium between costs of production and distribution andcustomer satisfaction, or the customer's "experience" of the product. Cincinnati: South-Western Publishing Company, 1969.----------------------- Endnotes [i]Weldon J. Thecondition of hair was one index of this awareness. The diversity of views about the construction of African Americanimages of beauty as mediated through hair-care products can be inferredfrom the record of innovation in marketing such products. "Hairpeace." African American Review 27 (Spring, 1993): 37- 41.Conrads, David. Some of the ingredients (saidshe) came from Africa, though it is more likely they were sourced and mixedin St. [xx]Rachel Buchman, "The Search for Good Hair--Styling Black Womanhoodin America," World and I 16 (February 2 1): 19 . . Social, psychological, and cultural dynamics of the connection betweencustomers and the objects and services they buy are in the background ofthis research, which examines the marketing of hair-care products toAfrican Americans in the early and mid-2 th century. Rather, like many women of all colors, theysee hair as "a medium to understand complex identity politics thatintersect along the lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, power, andbeauty."[xviii] This is consistent with marketing theory that anticipatesclasses within classes, as noted above. Logan to the effectthat Walker and her products "made straight hair 'good hair,'" in the blackmass market. But what companies are selling (say, fast-actingwidgets, a tangible good) and what customers are buying (say, anopportunity to save time, an intangible value) may be different. [xvi]Gates, 165. . New York: Pocket Books, 1972.New York Times News Service. [ii]Ibid., 7. Walkerrecruited nearly 1, black women around the country as sales agents, or"private hawkers, most of whom used and swore by her products."[xx] In thisview, irrespective of dominant-culture influences on beauty standards,Walker's marketing method had the effect of "remaking the image of blackwomen's hair as valuable."[xxi] Buchman cites feminist Judith Butler's observation that race is asocially constructed identity, but adds, "If race is a constructedidentity, it is important to identify who constructs it for whom."[xxii]Where hair care products for African Americans are concerned, it isimportant to recognize that there was controversy in the black community inthe 19 s over whether blacks should straighten their hair to conform tononblack beauty standards.[xxiii] In Buchman's view, Walker seized theinitiative with beauty standards, subverting them by locating control ofthem with blacks themselves. [xxiii]Gates, 165; [xxiv]Buchman,193. Walker and her (first) product:Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. "Madam C.J. [ix]Malcolm X, and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NewYork: Grove Press, 1965), 55ff. The research will setforth the social and historical context in which demographic-specificcosmetics were targeted at specialized ethnic groups in the US and thendiscuss how the phenomenon of marketing hair-care products to AfricanAmericans prefigured contemporary niche-marketing analysis and strategy ina way predicated of deeply felt social and cultural forces as well as themore impersonal force of mere purchasing power.Body Marketing theory has been identified not only as an aspect of businesstheory but also as a fundamental component of social, cultural, andpolitical history and of the satisfaction of society within history, "astrategic ingredient" of the "entire industrial process.[i]" But its realimport lies in a wider context than that of industrial 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."[ii]The marketing process has the effect of adding value (whether monetary orsocial) to a product. Deerfield Beach, Florida: Heath Communications, Inc., 199 .Morrison, Toni. [xiv]Bundles, 75-225, passim; Conrads, 234. "The Search for Good Hair--Styling Black Womanhood in America." World and I 16 (February 2 1): 19 -94.Bundles, A'Lelia. In his autobiography, Malcolm Xvividly describes the pains he took as a young man to straighten his hairwith a "conk"[ix] as a means of suppressing his black identity, in theyears before he was able to articulate the idea that "black is beautiful." Plainly, African Americans have responded to overt and covert messagesof social conformity in the matter of cosmetics use. According to Banks, "hair is a means by whichone can understand broader cultural issues,"[v] especially if those issuesinvolve the social experience of black women. "Madam's Crusade: A Black Woman's Hair-Care Empire Set a Style and Smashed Barriers." Time 7 December 1998: 165.Grier, W.H., & Cobbs, P.M. Shame and Guilt: Masters of Disguise. Shaw, Jr., Marketing: An Integrated,Analytical Approach, 2nd ed. [xv]Bundles, 48f. Louis. [xxi]Ibid. The Life and Times of Madam C.J. "63 Years Later, Inventor Glad She Made Waves." Chicago Tribune 3 November 1989: C4.Taylor, Weldon J., and Shaw, Roy T., Jr. Icompliment them. Louis and Denver, where she moved withsalesman and third husband Charles Joseph Walker in 19 5. Walker Amassed a Fortune Making and Selling Hair-Care Products,"World and I 16 (November 2 1): 233. Washington criticized blacks who imitated whitesin hairstyle, dress, and so on.[xii] A difficulty with the controversy between the so-called hairculturists who straightened black women's hair and critics of imitatingwhites was that lack of good information overlapped with social custom andpractice and rural-urban tensions among American blacks.[xiii] At the turnof the century, Negro rural folk wisdom had it that black women should notwash their hair more than once a month. Theevolution of modern marketing theory over the course of the 2 th centurywas marked as much by attention to the psychology and sociology ofconsumers' value judgments and priorities as by attention to merepurchasing power vis-à-vis goods and services. Madame Walker, thedaughter of slaves, began her working life by taking in whites' washing.One account of Walker's success is that, as a washerwoman, she worked withchemicals that she began to notice had the effect of straightening the hairof black persons.[x] This preparation, according to that account, wasaggressively marketed beginning in 19 5 and led to a whole line of beautyproducts for women of color, the first-ever of its kind. Madame Walker and those who continue to build on her ideas redefined blackness by redefining black body image.[xxiv] Walker undoubtedly built an empire. never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair.[xxviii] According to Taylor and Shaw, "knowledges of group influences offer ameans of creating a more effective [marketing] plan."[xxix] They might haveas easily said "attention to group influences," where the marketing of hair-care products to African Americans is concerned. It isthis equilibrium that "triggers a market transaction."[iii] In such adynamic situation, identifying market attributes involves observingpatterns of consumption, needs, and wants; however, consumption patternsmay be a function of a variety of socioeconomic forces, which operatedifferently on different groups. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books,1968), 2 4. [iii]Ibid., 32. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness. . To the degree turn-of-the-previous-century aesthetic sensibilities appear to work on theaesthetics of the modern period, the resilience of the dominant idealspeaks to the power of marketing image and message to persist amiddissident aesthetic and analytic voices. Another view is suggestedby Banks's study of modern black girls and women, not all of whom equatestraight hair with good hair. Buchman quotes one such woman: "Black people can gettheir hair to look like Caucasian people, and I think it looks good. Additionally, the direct-sales structuretacitly promised beauty plus financial success--much as the same structuredoes today. New York: Basic Books, 1968.Malcolm X, and Haley, Alex. [viii]Jane Middleton-Moz, Shame and Guilt: Masters of Disguise(Deerfield Beach, Florida: Heath Communications, Inc., 199 ), 39. On this account, Walker--actually, as one Mrs. SarahBreedlove Davis--migrated from the rural Deep South to St. And through their only daughter hadattempted to erase any signs of cultural heritage. . Taylor, and Roy T. [vi]W.H. [xii]A'Lelia Bundles, The Life and Times of Madam C.J. (1991, August 18). Black ladies loved it. But, prodded bylawyers, she did reap the fruits of her patent, being virtually lionized bythe Chicago public-affairs establishment and being awarded a number ofhonorary advanced degrees over the course of her life. [xix]Bundles, 236. . . It may be useful at this point todistinguish between the exercise of marketing an invention industrially andmarketing the effect of the invention's use vis-à-vis the cultural messagesthe invention enabled. Gates[xvii] cites the historian Rayford W. Grier and Cobbs cite adominant American "ethos"[vi] that has always included a presumption ofblack inferiority, hence fostered a sense of cultural and societalalienation. American History Illustrated 24 (1989): 24-25.Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The merchandiseline in turn was expanded into a business empire that included beautyschools that focused on providing hair-care services to women of color.[xi] A different account of Walker's financial empire comes from a greatgranddaughter. One must begin with the extraordinary story of Madam C.J. [xiii]David Conrads, "An Entrepreneurial Woman-The Daughter of Slaves,Madam C.J. Louis. [xxii]Ibid. According to Bundles, Walker's sense of her contribution to the marketwas that she could tap into "an amalgamated aesthetic, an African Americanlook that borrowed, adapted and reconfigured the fashion of bothcultures."[xix] Equally significant for Walker's products as marketingsubjects is that they were promoted by convinced consumers. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. [xviii]Banks, 148. . Marjorie StewartJoyner was one of the first black women to receive a utility patent. She almost missedobtaining a patent on the machine because it had been in use for almostthree years before she submitted a formal application. Walker, who liked to bereferred to as Madame Walker, made her fortune on a cosmetic preparationthat was said to restore hair growth in black women. Thus a combination of urbanpoverty, poor nutrition, absence of indoor plumbing, and poor hygieneappears to have been responsible for the fact that Walker's hair, like thatof other rural migrants, began to fall out. Marketing: An Integrated, Analytical Approach. [xi]New York Times News Service, "Exhibit Hails Inventions of African-Americans," Chicago Tribune 18 August 1991: C14. A St.Louis hair "culturist," Annie Pope-Turnbo, elsewhere called Annie TurnboPope Malone's Poro Co.,[xvi] was marketing a hair-restorer product toblacks at the time Walker was in St. They fight this battle to the grave. I figured you could use them like hair rollers, then heat them up to cook a permanent curl into the hair. In thecase of marketing hair care products to African Americans, marketers' andconsumers' conceptions of ideal body and beauty types illustrate a longtimepresumption of white-culture characteristics as being the standard ofphysical beauty and social and economic success against which nonconformingtypes are measured: blond, straight hair, blue eyes, slender body image,Eurocentric wardrobe, etc.
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