YouTube just put your spending on the scoreboard
Nine separate parasocial stories came out of one event. The throughline is worse than any of them.
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The business press has started writing about parasocial attachment and calling it customer obsession
TechTarget, on the four components of a customer obsession model. Read it twice and then read this site instead.
I want to be fair here: companies genuinely are trying to know their customers, and most of them are bad at it in boring ways. But watch the vocabulary migrate. It went from a psychological observation to a sales framework in about fifteen years, and the moment a feeling becomes a component in a model, nobody in the room is talking about the person anymore. The Insight Company is what that looks like from inside.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
Sources
4 components of a customer obsession model ↗
TechTarget · 24 SEP 2026
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
The K-pop intimacy economyIdol apps, paid messaging, fan-owned content, fan-voted releases, anniversary features, and a fandom documented and researched as a business model.The same feeling, largerNothing about the bond is new. The scale, the persistence, the responsiveness, the willingness of companies to act on it as a measurable and…
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