People in engineering and production have been saying this for years... the alarming thing is that marketing isn't on the list.
Most people do not have a birds eye view that lets them see all the problem spaces and all the solutions. Marketing is increasing the likelihood you are aware there is a solution out there, and sales is the part where you become convinced the solution offered is the right one.
If you are in the lucky position where your company's solution is considered the standard and is widely known, marketing becomes all about maintaining that perception.
Coca-Cola spends ~4 billion dollars a year on marketing. Pepsi spends ~3 billion. Soda makes you fat and unhealthy. This is not solving any problem, only causing them.
The incentives for marketing and sales also aren't really aligned with what is actually best for the consumer. If you wanted them to be aligned with what the consumer wanted, then you as the consumer would be the one paying the marketing company, and they would compete to be the best at finding you solutions to your problems.
This is kind of what Google Search did before they really monetized their search. You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems. Now companies pay them to be brought to your attention, which is why Google Search sucks now.
> Aligned with what is actually best for the consumer
This is a classic straw man.
Who said it needs to be? They are simply educating you on the existence of their product. But marketing doesn't remove your agency to decide if you want to drink them or not, or whether that product is good for you. There are products that I am aware of due to marketing that serve no purpose to me, but I am not helplessly buying them anyways. I agree that in some scenarios (like we saw with cigarettes) this can go awry, and maybe advertising should be restricted for certain types of food. But in general, most products are not like this.
> You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems.
If Google didn't solve a problem for you, you would likely stop using it. You wouldn't continue to use Google simply to see their ads. Their advertisers would disappear if you weren't there, so first and foremost they must deliver a good product to you.
If it didn't to some extent do that there would be little point in spending all that money on it.
This discovery you talk about, I am thinking hard about a single case in my whole life. Can't find any.
At some point you may need to buy a new washing machine. If you knew nothing about washing machines, you might have no information to work from.
However, maybe you saw an LG commercial at some point. So now when you walk into the store and see an LG washing machine, that recognition leads you to consider it. Maybe because of that commercial, you saw a feature. Now when you look at the Samsung washing machine and it doesn't have that feature, you consider that model to be lacking over the LG machine.
A personal anecdote here: Amazon now has so many different brands and sellers with product lines I've never heard of before. Their ratings have long since lost meaning. I often find it very difficult to decide on even simple purchases because I don't have enough information to know what is good.
This is the best way, at least in part, because Consumer Reports does not accept advertising or sponsorships.
And you don't find out about Consumer Reports through advertising, either, it's through word of mouth like this post.
The real threat of AI/ML/LLMs are that they're going to get smart enough to do all of this stupid incredibly repetitive work and then there's not going to be much left to do. We might actually reach a post scarcity economy and the transition will be _interesting_.
I think it is fair to argue that word of mouth, good prices and quality rpoducts would thrive more often without marketing, compared to brightly coloured, cheaply made, nonsense that is easy to sell