A post-modern company's market range is shifting from products to problem solutions. Communication, then, competes with consumption. Anyone who wants to hold his ground in the post-modern marketplace has to come up with forms of consumption which reflect the communicative desire. And marketing has to be communication design, since communication has now been superimposed onto consumption. As we've seen, communication design is no longer directed at consciousness, but rather at its immune system, namely the emotions.
Emotions correspond to patterns of relationships and are in a certain way learned.
Thus it's possible to model emotions. Emotional Design crafts patterns of feelings, and I think that marketing managers could learn something decisive from cultural historians in this regard. Today we can say, very analogously, that emotions are drilled into us by design and by the media. And now we finally come to the market of trends and lifestyles. We still know little of their logic, as the intellectuals don't like to get their hands dirty here.