Markets being more efficient means that customers know better what is actually going on, and marketroids have less influence over their perceptions. Sure, there

Markets being more efficient means that customers know better what is actually going on, and marketroids have less influence over their perceptions. Sure, there are still horrid inefficiencies, like the 1000% markup on eyeglasses, but 19dollarglasses.com and the like has begun to close that inefficiency. It isn't that marketing has changed media, like the expansion into TV advertising from radio and paper; it's that marketing fundamentally is waning in effectiveness as people have more ways of communicating honestly as people, rather than as marketing departments. As a result, the startup looking for potential customers not only doesn't need a huge distribution organization, it doesn't even need to get good at "modern marketing techniques," since most successfully marketed products, particularly on the internet, have succeeded because they were better, not because they used hip new marketing techniques. Even PR is ineffective at penetrating actual blogs, although it still has an effect on old-style newspapers that have been webified.