Disruptive Marketing

EPILOGUE

FEELINGS RULE

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotionswill never lie to you.

—ROGER EBERT, movie critic

FOR MUCH OF its existence, the theory behind marketing was simple: if you have the means to create a message and the wealth to distribute it, you can control the dialogue about your company or product. When people feel a certain way, however, more words won’t change their minds. But new feelings may.

Activist and academic Lawrence Lessig describes this effect in his book, The Future of Ideas. The concentration of media and distribution, he explains, would eventually falter not because of governments or regulations but because of the way disruptive marketing instills itself in our world—that is, by people inhabiting the Internet. ...