Ch. 4 - The Marketing Environment

     Lush Cosmetics has been known to serve women as well as men who seek organic body care products. Their target market consists of teenage and adult women from 14-30 years old. The price range and store locations indicates that their target market is one of medium to high income and comes from a highly populated urban setting. Lush effectively reaches their target marker. Lush's ethics and strives in the cosmetic as well as political worlds attract those with component lifestyles particularly overworked city types, vegans, vegetarians, activists, etc. Today's society, for the most part, seeks to seem as educated, politically correct, and politically aware as possible. A way of seeming like they are all of these things is by surrounding themselves with products that constantly remind them that they are what they seek to be. Certainly Lush's unique products backed with the company's ethics is widely sought by those wishing to piece together the increasingly popular component lifestyle of being "educated."

     True, there target market is young and adult women, however their demography is extremely diverse. Lush does not care about their customer's religion, ethnicity, or gender. It is undoubtedly because of this that people of all races, religions, and genders shop there. For example, yesterday I walked into Lush with a friend who had never been there before. A friendly sales associate immediately gave her the store tour and described all of the different types of product lines they have. When explaining some products that seemed to lean towards a certain gender, she always assured both me and her that both products can be used for both men and women. She even declared that she particularly loves the men's line of products "Dirty." Even when she was showing the "Emotional Brilliance" makeup line to my female friend, she assured me, a male, that if I had interest in the product that there was no judgement. 

     When talking about Lush Cosmetics marketing environment, it is important to point out the fact that Lush does not have a marketing department and relies solely on word of mouth advertisement. Lush focuses on relationship marketing so that they have many regular customers for years. They rely on these customers to bring in their friends which can also contribute the diverse demography at Lush. The company doesn't do much advertisement so it relies on its target market to bring in its secondary target market: friends of the primary target market. This approach to their marketing environment may seem unpractical, however it is how Lush branched out from having one store in England to having hundreds of stores in over fifty countries.