[catechu]

I think product sales is a game of incomplete information in which sellers don't know what each buyer wants and buyers don't necessarily know what they want either. It seems to me that advertising, which is effectively gambling on consumers' unknown desires, is the only way for either party to discover that hidden knowledge of what buyers want -- a commercial Monte Carlo simulation of sorts.

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted," Henry Ford once said, "they would have said a faster horse."