It's more likely that you are just a standard consumer that doesn't recognise non-obvious advertising than you only buy products that don't advertise.

How do you or the people doing the comparisons you read know the product exists without advertising?

I don't buy this theory, because in my job we get a lot of new customers every year, and we don't advertise. Other forms of marketing are just so much more effective. Putting your product out there is not the same as advertising, people can find your product by search engine or other means, and then if you compete on price, quality and features, the product is marketed by word of mouth.

Do products show up on your store shelves because the company did a ton of advertising and customers were begging the store manager to sell it? Usually not. Instead these are negotiations between businesses. How often do you see ads for new products, compared to products that have been around for decades?

The only situation were advertising is wise is when you have a product that is not different from your competitors product and you have a customer base that is ignorant, so that you have a lot of margin for advertising to get your stuff moved. Ignorant in this situation can mean just ignorant on the product category.

Running a website to get traffic from a search engine is advertising, it's just not directly paid advertising.

Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.

If you think that is the only time advertising makes sense I'm going to assume your employer is very slow growing. Advertising pretty much always makes sense one you have protect market fit. I can't think of a single business that has that which would be worse off with advertising.

If we go down that path, then everything is advertising and the word means nothing. Your label is on your product? Guess that's advertising. But what purpose does word-wrapping have except shutting down conversation?

If advertising was a sure thing as long as you claim, then how come none of the ad sellers can guarantee sales? Until they offer a guaranteed increase in sales or your money back, I have a hard time believing the praise.

I think businesses severely underestimate word of mouth, and overestimate how effective their advertising was. That's understandable, since they don't want to feel like fools for having spent money on worthless advertising.

>Products often show up on store shelves for two reasons. The product does independent advertising so the store knows it will sell or they advertise to store buyers.

From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products. It's not the store manager deciding to start selling the new Snickers flavour because he saw an ad on a bus stop.

Advertising is anything you do to try and increase the visibility of something.

No single ad is guaranteed and i never made that claim.

Word of mouth is great but an extremely slow way to grow a business and tends to geographically limit you and requires advertising first to get the initial clients.

> From what I know, products show up on shelves because the suppliers let the retailers know about their new products

I cover this scenario with the advertising to store buyers line.

Even if you make the perfect product, you may well have to spend a lot on advertising.

In Fintech, it feels like the first $5 of advertising per customer just goes to persuading them that you're not a scam.

Charities, travel services and perfumes have value propositions often hard to express. Perhaps a perfect communicator could get it across in a short essay, but most rely expensive ads.

There are some domains where customers are well educated & motivated to seek out better products, like consumer electronics & cars, but those are the minority.

I can't disagree with you on charities, since their business is literally begging for money. They're never going to have a "customer" recommending them to friends and family.

Travel and Fintech are products that are for everyone, so there will always be people interested in your stuff and then recommend to their friends if your product is good. Especially for travel, people are always seeking out new "products".

I think it's interesting that you brought up cars. In the past 20 years I've only seen two types of car ads: One is the stylish young woman going on a date, the second type is with young urban adults doing street dance and then the car flashes quickly in the end of the ad. Because advertising is only directed at certain groups. To normal people, these car ads communicate "We hate you" from the car company to the consumer, and would be a net negative for the brand. But since normal people are going to compare price, gas economy and features when buying a car anyway, this brand negativity doesn't mean much.

An interesting feature of car marketing is that - in general - it only targets new car buyers. These people are a relatively small segment of the driving population.

I wonder whether those groups you describe disproportionately purchase mass market new cars.

Those groups can mostly amount to less than 10% of prospective new car buyers, if I'm allowed to speculate. I think that almost everybody who is in the market for a new car will know several persons to give them recommendations and advice. So the ads will only be targeting some people who have a lot of disposable money and few real friends to help them choose a car, and no understanding to compare cars themselves. Maybe the children of rich careerists?

Or it could be that the advertisement and media industry have their heads too far up their own asses to care what they're doing. It certainly seems like this sometimes, when huge brands can destroy themselves permanently in a matter of days with out of touch advertising.