That is a totally ignorant viewpoint. Just think of eg applications or music or films or websites. Without marketing the product will most likely drown in the sea of mediocrity.

As a music lover I did not know just how much great free music exists until the netlabel scene rose up in the past years and started promoting music throughout their hemisphere. Nowadays I often find "professional high quality" music under free licenses but since it is not played on the radio or TV (thanks to music industry marketing deals), it does not spread to the major part target audience that relies on those channels for their new material.

I agree, the "Build it and they will come" idea drives me insane. For the 0.1% of people that the approach works for, they treat it like gospel, and it just ends up giving the other 99.9% of people with great products an entitlement complex.

Well, if you work in the Music industry go and pay millions on Ads and TV commercials and you can create the next mainstream artist like Lady Gaga or something.

Try do the same thing with a website with poor content, visitors will never come back.

Try do the same thing with an iPhone/Android app, user installs and uninstall within 20 minutes.

Try do the same with a paid web service, user will only pay the first month of the service.

An Amazing Product will engage the users and they will automatically spread the word.

I certainly will not give that advice to Tommy Mottola(or whoever is in charge of Sony Music now).

Read this, this is Dropbox(YC 07) CEO talking about Adwords.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/dropbox-drew-houston-adwor...

Its true in its essence, but the author skipped out a lot of details in marketing. You would never hear about many great products unless it was promoted by "disingenuous" marketing.

The author skipped about his working hard to promote his blog, mainly using the guest posts for other blogs.

> This is gold...

More like Fool's gold.