I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/

I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/critical faculties of the customers in an attempt to meet their internally generated needs. In addition, that often the purpose of marketing is to induce consumption on an irrational basis rather than a rational one. The resulting "intrinsic/social value" would then have been manufactured by the marketing process rather than having arisen from reasoned value judgments or needs met by the product but individually arrived at by the customers. To see that activating these mechanisms is the purpose of marketing requires a simple survey of the history of marketing and marketing literature. This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over. Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.