> Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?
Yes. It's hardly magic. If some business or service provides a great value or "a better way of being" people naturally get excited and tell their friends. I'm not a domain expert but my understanding is that these organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. The other organic thing that happens is when people realize they have a need and ask their friends for referrals and recommendations. It works great if your product is great.
If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. Deliberate marketing is commercial propaganda. Someone wants to put their hand in my wallet and is deliberately using professionally-design artificial media to trick me into letting them.
Your example of the barker with the megaphone is noise pollution and a waste of a human being. But you can go much further back. It was decadent when the Romans did it, and it was decedent when we San Franciscans did it, it's decadent today.
> its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing
You can't conceive it, maybe, but I can. There are worlds without advertising/marketing. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. You might not believe me, but it's true, and from those worlds our modern advertising/marketing mania seems like a madness.
First, there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example.
The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone. For example, I met a guy once who was part of a very high-end IT consultancy. They had A-list customers, all the work they could handle, and their website was a single line of text that basically said, "You have a problem? Email us". In other words, most markets have a subset of "quiet" companies that thrive on word-of-mouth alone.
Yes. It's hardly magic. If some business or service provides a great value or "a better way of being" people naturally get excited and tell their friends. I'm not a domain expert but my understanding is that these organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. The other organic thing that happens is when people realize they have a need and ask their friends for referrals and recommendations. It works great if your product is great.
If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. Deliberate marketing is commercial propaganda. Someone wants to put their hand in my wallet and is deliberately using professionally-design artificial media to trick me into letting them.
Your example of the barker with the megaphone is noise pollution and a waste of a human being. But you can go much further back. It was decadent when the Romans did it, and it was decedent when we San Franciscans did it, it's decadent today.
> its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing
You can't conceive it, maybe, but I can. There are worlds without advertising/marketing. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. You might not believe me, but it's true, and from those worlds our modern advertising/marketing mania seems like a madness.