> The polio vaccine serves an actual need, and if you're not selling something I would refrain from using the word marketing.
Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was. Because the national, then international, polio eradication project absolutely included perception and behavior modification.
Polio was only paralytic to a fraction of a fraction of its victims. For most, it was a bad bout of diarrhea and several bad days. And the vaccine (unlike the safer designs we have now) was either killed virus or half-killed live strain; in one terribly unfortunate batch, it caused polio. People had legitimate reason to believe things were good enough as-is (after all, most everyone had either gotten and survived polio or knew someone who had, with far, far fewer "Uncle Harry got it and he's in an iron lung" stories by volume) and getting some (possibly still-active) vaccine shot into their arms was going to be a bad long-term decision.
Against all of that, the March of Dimes did a huge amount of work to get people to go against their inclinations and the evidence available to their eyes to move polio from an "everybody eventually gets this" common environmental risk to a "makes the news" occasional outbreak. It's a brilliant success story of perception adjustment, on par with Colonel Stapp's crusade to make the seat-belt mandatory (speaking of which... http://persuasion-and-influence.blogspot.com/2015/02/wear-se...).
> Marketing is all about changing perceptions
No disagreement here. Sometimes, it's used to help people believe that the world can be other than it is, if we only all change our behavior to make it so.
> I used the cosmetics industry as an example because they've turned this into a veritable industry: people are made to feel terribly unhappy
No disagreement that cosmetics is full of bad actors and bad action, but people were putting eyeshadow and rouge on back when the closest thing we had to marketing was some statues declaring that a dead pharaoh was a cool guy (with the name scribbled out and replaced by some other dead pharaoh's name). I submit to you the humble possibility that people don't doll up because they're compelled by advertisers to do so (though I've no doubt advertising plays a huge factor in the way they choose to doll up).
> even marketing a good product comes with the implied 'right to market', where possibly none exists
The right to freedom of speech isn't universal, I agree. I submit that we do more harm than good trying to split the hair on deciding when something is freely-offered speech and when something is marketing, however. Good luck squaring those circles without getting eerily close to "prior restraint on open communication of ideas."