We're using electronic media to spread this benchmarking message far and wide. Because there's always a company offering a better or cheaper or faster product, or a person who's more clever than Oprah or cuter than Tyra, it's easy to shop around, to demand more, to be constantly dissatisfied.
Dissatisfaction is the natural result when everything you don't have is very important. I'm not convinced "relationships" is the solution, though. Seems a bit trite.
Stop The Funny#8482; writes My personal view is that branding and marketing are, strategically, value free. What counts are the questions and answers you feed into the machine.
I think this wrongly assumes the machine will accept any questions and answers. In reality, you can only market for something's increasing importance. There's no way to market the unimportance of something.
So we have marketing for the importance of Coke and marketing for the importance of Pepsi, but there's no marketing for the (true) idea that neither are important. There's no one advertising against anything. In many cases, it's even illegal to do so. I couldn't possibly run marketing saying "Coke is crap. It's just a bunch of chemicals that are rotting your body and some drugs that make you want to keep drinking it. And Pepsi is the same thing in a different package. Neither are important to your happiness or well-being, so stop buying them."