The spectacle refers to the third-party voices that carry meaning about your product to audiences you cannot reach directly: media, journalists, industry analysts, professional communities, influencers, consultants, and anyone else with an audience that trusts them. The spectacle matters because third-party credibility is a fundamentally different kind of signal than what you say about yourself. When you say your product is the email killer, it's a claim. When a major publication runs a headline calling you the email killer, it's a fact; at least in the perception of everyone who reads it. The meaning that arrives via the spectacle carries the credibility of the source, which means it quilts more effectively than your own communication ever can. Getting the spectacle to talk about you is not primarily a PR problem. It's a meaning problem. Third-party voices talk about things that are interesting, surprising, or polarizing; things that give their audience something to think about or react to. A product that means "another one" gives the spectacle nothing to say. A product that means something specific, unusual, and connected to something people already care about gives the spectacle exactly what it needs. See also: Quilting, DeMark, Algorithmic.