The Lonely Crowd
"In a highly networked world, doing business well means more than adopting online promotion, viral marketing or any of the conventional wisdom about selling the same thing in a different way. It means designing media whose primary value lies in its ability to connect people. The transition is from architecture to urban planning, from storytelling to world-building, from individual experience to social experience."
Some marketers still think they know better than consumers what’s good for them. Companies that feel their job is to "educate" you (think Microsoft, hearing "we have to educate our customers" again and again drove me mad when I worked there), or that will require you to sit back and relax and leave it up to them (think Disney) almost genetically can’t comprehend these things.
Even those who claim they want to enable you as a doer talk to you in the imperative form, from "Just Do It" Nike to "Think Different" Apple to "Go Create" Sony. Who do you think you are to talk to me like that? (do I sound like Joe Pesci in a Scorsese movie?) How about "We’ll leave you the fuck alone and listen"? Taglines are even more revealing than those that wrote them imagine.
