"To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing." This simply isn't true, it ignores products becoming popular on the merit of the

"To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing." This simply isn't true, it ignores products becoming popular on the merit of their quality alone. Practically all open source software uses this method, even if it isn't sold, it competes with commercial software and often wins without any marketing. I get that marketing comes in different forms, one could argue merit is a form of marketing, but that's not what the author is talking about. Marketing tricks us into choosing products based on values other than their efficacy to get the job done, and as such is a bad thing, not to mention the raft of really bad side effects it brings with it.