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.