Rapid technological change creates products so advanced and complex that consumers lose the ability to evaluate them based on their actual, objective merits. Purchases become based more on ethereal product “image” than on any substantive advantages one product may reasonably be said to hold over another.

This quasi-magical method of making choices substantially increases the importance of advertising as a competitive tool. And since the ability to pay for effective cognitive competition tends to be related to an enterprise’s size and revenues, the shift toward an image-based marketplace contributes significantly to our contemporary trend toward corporate gigantism.