The adage that the only bad publicity is no publicity may apply to celebrities, but this article will show how the wrong kind of fascination can be enormously destructive to businesses that actually deliver products or services.

My last column, “Propaganda, Fascination, and Quality,” discussed the role of propaganda (any communication whose purpose is to influence behavior) and fascination (a human predisposition to form an opinion of something in roughly nine seconds, as discussed by Sally Hogshead at the 2013 ASQ World Conference) on organizational behavior and customer response. Fascination is what got me to actually open and read a “presorted standard,” i.e., junk, letter the other day, when I normally throw these into the waste basket unread. 

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