[rmk2]

> what girls innately like

This makes the assumption that there is indeed something innate about purchasing. Short of credible psychological research, most market research relies on past sales data, past products, as well as a survey of existing products. Marketing, then, forms a self-stabilising and self-perpetuated system that makes future decisions based on its own past decisions.

This is remarkably close to Adorno and Horkheimer's view of the cultural industry: The underlying thesis here is that the culture industry preselects cultural production. Within the constraints of that preselection, the customer is free to choose whatever he or she fancies. This in turn leads to a culture industry that can claim that every subsequent selection is indeed strictly based on past consumer behaviour. After a while, this claim can even be truthful, if this initial preselection is ignored. That is why the Dialectic of Enlightenment calls this a mass deception.