While I respect your line of thinking, I believe that advertising does improve a product substantially. It improves how you are perceived using it, it can chang

While I respect your line of thinking, I believe that advertising does improve a product substantially. It improves how you are perceived using it, it can change your experience with the product, and it can reduce the amount of time you need and give you better information about products -- especially when there are no obvious benchmarks for the industry. (E.g. clothing) Part of advertising is educating customers on what features your product has, and doing so in an easy to understand way. Imagine a world with no advertising. You want to buy a coat, so you search Google. There are no ads, so you just click the first link (which has done no SEO). What do you see? A picture of a coat? A list of coat 'specs'? A description of the coat? All of these could be considered advertising (People "wasting" money on putting coats on models of different body sizes, creating different standards for clothing 'specs', and copywriting product descriptions) yet they also provide value to the customer. So I would say that advertising has to be considered part of the product that can enhance its value.