[thehotdon]

Marketers do nothing to "make the product better".

They pump exorbitant amounts of money into advertising, thereby increasing the final price paid by customers without increasing product quality. Furthermore, they use these advertisements to inflate their customers' perceived value of the products, once again, without actually increasing product quality.

Marketers maximize profits, not quality.

[sixtofour]

If a product is crappy, no one will see the advertisements. If a product is great, people will use it, and see.

Google is nothing but an advertising company, yet 99+% of us only ever see them as a search, email, blogging, and cloud docs company. A huge number of us use their products, because they're good products. As their products improve, their cash accumulates.

I've never been in a Google meeting, but I suppose Google's marketers have some input into product development; at Google, that input is probably based on data.

[klbarry]

Value does not exist except as what the customer perceives value to be.