"How lasting the impact of social media will have is yet to be determined, but one thing for sure, it has turned the chain of influence upside down. Today the reader, the lowly reader, that presumably passive consumer of all the great insight handed down by the reporter, confirmed by the analyst, attested to by the reference customer—this reader, I say, has now become the writer! Except it is not a reader/writer. It is reader/writers at large, many readers, the wisdom of crowds. We have embarked upon the world's largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for grabs."

“Without “big data”, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.”

“Just as in literature, where memorable characters like Hamlet or Heathcliff or even Dirty Harry stand out and become symbols for a larger segment of humanity, so in marketing can whole target-customer populations become imagined as teenyboppers, yuppies, pickups and gun racks, or the man in the gray flannel suit. These are all just images—stand-ins for a greater reality—picked out from a much larger set of candidate images on the grounds that they really “click” with the sum total of an informed person’s experience. These were, in short, the memorable ones.”

“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”

“Marketing has long known how to exploit fads and how to develop trends.”

“Entering the mainstream market is an act of burglary, of breaking and entering, of deception, often even of stealth. Mapping out a global assault plan, attacking on all fronts at once, may work for massively intimidating market leaders who already have troops in place throughout the world, but it is just plain silly for stripling challengers. Instead, we need to pick our spots carefully, attack fiercely, and then dig in and hold.”

“Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the High Tech Marketing Enlightenment new technology. Fundamentally, they see themselves as smarter than their opposite numbers in competitive companies—and, quite often, they are. Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage. That advantage can only come about if no one else has discovered it. They do not expect, therefore, to be buying a well—tested product with an extensive list of industry references. Indeed, if such a reference base exists, it may actually turn them off, indicating that for this technology, at any rate, they are already too late.”