Here's an example with the metaphor where marketing is not zero-sum:

1) Person A makes a crappy bandage (Y units of quality) with X units of budget and markets with 9X units of budget

2) Person B makes a decent bandage (5Y units of quality) with 5X units of budget.

If person B were to also market the bandage with 5X units of budget, they will take a larger fraction of person A's market share than if they don't, thus providing more value to people. Yes you can argue that if person A didn't exist, then they wouldn't need to spend this money and the bandage could be cheaper, but this is clearly an example where adding marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society.

Yes, I agree that adding a marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society. But the problem is, in the real world, the person A wins - marketing has much better ROI than investing in quality. I argue against the marketing precisely because of its power to paper over the problems with the actual good/service.

And I'm saying that's a tradeoff (marketing, sales, engineering, development vs maintenance, etc) that's as legitimate and at least as complex as the purely engineering tradeoffs I mentioned.

> And the word can get out fine by itself, actually.

Umm, good luck with that. There are only a few, small, specialized businesses for which that is true.