Ok here's a thought:
Maybe our need to believe in the heroic leaders model of history and management is at some level connected to/explained by our need to believe in some consumers being more influential than others...
Maybe they both come from the same mechanistic, heirarchical assumptions about the world?
Maybe - just maybe - they're both are wrong for the same reasons? Both insist that mass behaviour changes if and only if somebody does something to the mass (the lumpenproles?)
I suspect both are just as hard to shake, how ever much you point out the errors and the facts...
As Mintzberg says about companies and leaders, its all about "complex systems" which involve the co-creation of interesting outcomes (sometimes at least) which we can only make sense of in retrospect. It's more about the crowds than Comrade Lenin but naturally we (and he) describe it otherwise.
Just a thought, you know...
Hat tip btw to Johnnie for most recent stimulation in this area