Economics

Winemaking has remained largely unchanged for 7,000 years, but the United States wine industry has ballooned from 30 billion dollars in 2002 to 60 billion today, making it the largest in the world. Wine producers see customers as having limited expertise and demonstrating inconsistent, difficult-to-predict preferences. They seek to influence tastes by shaping markets through vision and social influence. Even as wine producers dismiss customer input and the pursuit of profit, they value the opinions of peers and influential media and critics. Consumers looking to buy a bottle of wine confront thousands of choices. To navigate, they invariably turn to those experts that the wineries have worked so hard to influence. Producers of wines define categories and set benchmarks, and consumers become fans and pay premium prices, despite the availability of excellent alternatives. How does this summary fit into Structure Conduct Performance or Marco?