Where The Suckers Moon should be at the top of your list if you work in marketing and advertising.  This quote is so remarkably appropriate given the troubles plaguing the U.S. auto industry.

Subaru of America had learned the lesson of advertising. Advertising did not work by entertaining or assaulting the intellect of its audience, as the company’s previous agencies had believed. Nor did it work through subliminal manipulation, as so many Americans, ever on the lookout for conspiracies, misguidedly thought. Instead, advertising, as the great ad man Bruce Barton had acknowledged decades before, was “something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it.” To succeed, advertising cannot seek to invent a new soul. Instead, it must reinforce and redirect the existing image. It must serve as a form of mythology, providing the corporation’s various and often competing constituencies – of which consumers are only one of many – heroes, villains, principles, rules of conduct and stories with which they can rally the faithful to remain true to the cause. Only then, with luck and effort, can they win new converts.