If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
>If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it isn't, there are established channels to sell it to distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer products is not usually a tool to let people know about new quality products).
We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it?
And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
That's really two different classes of products. You want to read a review before you buy a car, but by and large people actually do that already.
Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy it again.
Somehow you have to get your product in front of (and probably give it away) to the people doing the independent reviews and product testing. That's marketing.
There are probably some exceptions in well-defined markets with a limited number of products like automobiles but those are actually companies that, in general, spend a lot on marketing and advertising.
> If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to go into.
There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your target market where you can advertise.
If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?