Once upon a time, at a company I used to work, marketing was unofficially considered to be an apology letter that the company handed its customers when it couldn’t deliver on the product.

And as would be appropriate to such a sentiment, the marketing team and its expenses were treated accordingly, that is to say, considered a discretionary expenditure compared with something core like engineering or customer support.

When Products Should Speak for Themselves

Naval Ravikant himself has said, “You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing. You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.”.

Ideally, a product is supposed to solve a problem for a customer, and in that way, customers “hire” products to perform various jobs for them, jobs may be functional or they may be emotional. And when a product ceases to do the job satisfactorily or another product can do that job in a better way, the customer “fires” that product, that is, stops using that company’s product. Clayton Christensen said that back in the 1990s.

So, by that view, if a company has to resort to marketing, it means something’s wrong with the product. Because if the product was genuinely good and did the jobs the customer wanted it to do 100%, then there should be no need for any marketing.

And sometimes, business leaders might not be very comfortable with doing marketing because in their minds, marketing will cheapen the product, and one is not sure whether the customers that come aboard did so because they fell for the marketing or they genuinely love the product.

Another common view about marketing is that it is a way to hoodwink people into buying more of what you’re selling. Often we hear phrases like “oh, that’s just marketing”, “cut the marketing fluff”, “drop the spin”, or “I fell for their marketing”.

So, is marketing a sleight of hand to get people to buy something of poor quality?

How Marketing Changed (and Why It Had To)

Look, it may seem like I am coming down hard on marketing (and maybe I am), but I want to make clear I’m not against marketing per se, I’m against how it’s being used today. Marketing, at its core, is about informing the right people about your product. It is a way to help them reduce the energy they’d have to spend hunting for your product by reaching out to them first. Such forms of marketing still exist in the B2B space, but are increasingly rare in the B2C space.

Marketing may have started out as a solution to better inform consumers, the 1960s onwards (in the western world mainly) saw the choices available to customers increase rapidly. Faced with increasing competition whose products performed similarly to theirs (think Audi vs BMW vs Mercedes, or Marlboro vs Camel vs Lucky Strike) – companies started using marketing to differentiate their products in the mind of the customer. They had to do this because undifferentiated products gather no customer loyalty, nor can you charge extra for them.

As is the case with anything starting out, in the early days companies were cautious of adding hyperbole, puffery or any form of exaggeration to their marketing messages – at that time marketing may have been more “honest”. Just a little more spice added to the consumer facing message to make it stand out, just like one may add a little sugar to their tea.

You see, the reason why a company needs to resort to marketing in the first place has something to do with functional maturity of its product, and the degree of relevant competition.

As I’ve explained in the 2×2 matrix below, for a product aimed at a particular “job to be done” for the customer, the actual performance (esp. when talking about the extended product from Kotler’s 3 levels of product) can start from the “basic and inconsistent” level, and go up to the “advanced and consistent” level.

Relevant competition too, which means competing products that do exactly the same job – emotional and functional – that your product does, can go from “weak” to “strong”.

	Relevant Competition – Weak	Relevant Competition – Strong
Avg. Product Performance – Basic, Inconsistent	Product 🟢, Promotion 🔴, Place 🔴, Price 🔴	Product 🔴, Promotion 🔴, Place 🟡, Price 🟢
Avg. Product Performance – Advanced, Consistent	Product 🟢, Promotion 🟡, Place 🔴, Price 🔴	Product 🟡, Promotion 🟢, Place 🟢, Price 🟢

Note: Traffic lights (🔴, 🟡, 🟢) indicate the arena of competition for a company with 🔴 meaning very little attention, 🟡 meaning intermediate focus and 🟢 meaning prime focus and key arena of competition.

So, by this framework, the need for marketing emerges when the product reaches a level of functional maturity, but this is marketing like it was done in the 60s – “put the word out that your product exists, tell them a little bit what makes it special”.

But marketing becomes a real business imperative with the emergence of relevant competition – “ensure everyone and their brother knows the product exists, convince them it’s the best thing since sliced bread”.

The bottom line is: if your domain sees the emergence of true, relevant competition – either you need to make the competition obsolete (take your product to the next level), or your customer convinced (capture mind share by marketing).

Some companies decide the latter is the better approach, and so it is not a surprise to see that as the competitive landscape has become ever more crowded, companies have had to resort to all kinds of tricks (legal of course) to get people to buy their stuff, and that has led to marketing as we know it today – incessant, exaggerated, and promising the world.

In 2025, it seems both the marketing and the marketers are out to get you. I don’t mean they’re going to defraud you, but they are going to come really close, portraying the product as the solution to all your life’s problems. I can say this with some confidence because I’ve been a marketer myself.

I miss the good ol’days when not everyone was out to sell you things, when you could pick up your phone with confidence that someone you actually knew was calling and not some rando with a pre-approved loan. Indeed, this incessant marketing has been one of the side effects of the capitalistic zeitgeist in most parts of the world.

A Metabolic Analogy

Just like cells will stop responding to insulin when they’ve been subject to very high amounts of it (due to chronically elevated blood sugar), a person will stop responding to marketing when they’ve been subject to very high amounts of it. In that way, marketing and sugar are similar, good in limited quantities, but too much of either is bad.

I think there’s a lesson in this analogy.

Just like cells in a diabetic person become insulin-resistant, people in a capitalistic free-market economy become marketing-resistant.

A diet excessively high in sugar is inefficient in the practical, biological-systems sense – it delivers lots of calories while forcing the body to run extra, low-yield metabolic steps (and incur collateral damage) just to store or dispose of them.

Similarly, excessive marketing is inefficient – it delivers a lot of information while confusing the customer as to what he is actually buying, forcing him to rely on low-efficiency routes like the bandwagon effect, herd behaviour and memetic desire. No surprise then, when John Wanamaker, a 19th-century American merchant and marketing pioneer said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”.

The entire Google Ad Words (and other similar) business is built upon the foundation of delivering a more efficient marketing method. The performance marketing gang had its run in the decade of 2010-2020, but with new privacy rules, I think even they are falling back to the age old “spray and pray”.

Return to Honest Storytelling

And just like a moderate amount of sugar is acceptable, a moderate amount of marketing is not only fine — it’s necessary. Most modern businesses operate in markets with real, relevant competition, and even if they didn’t, customer awareness still needs to be earned. But marketing done well must be grounded in truth, clarity, and strategic intent.

That’s exactly where Aviral Prakash Consulting (APC) comes in. I help companies cut through the noise, diagnose their real marketing jobs-to-be-done, and build positioning, messaging, and GTM systems that attract the right customers without gimmicks or exaggeration. In a world saturated with empty claims, APC’s mandate is simple: help businesses communicate with discipline, integrity, and strategic precision — so their product’s true flavour comes through without overpowering sugar.