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. T… - Geoffrey Alexander Moore

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.

[Several] companies holds market share in excess of 50 percent in its prime market. All of them have been able to establish strongholds in the early majority segment, if not beyond, and to look forward from that position to continued growth, wondrously strong profit margins, and increasingly preferred relationships as suppliers to their customers. To be sure, some like Oracle and, more dramatically, Netscape have fallen on hard times, but even then customers often bend over backward to give market share leaders second and third chances, bringing cries of anguish from their competitors who would never be granted such grace.

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