The free market revolves around the idea that eventually bad players lose and good players selling what's best for the consumer win. Rational buyers buy what's best, so producers have to adapt to that.
But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing".
Which is actually largely what we are seeing is happening. Both in industry and in politics.
In industry some of the biggest companies in the world live off of ads. This is crazy if you think about it. So much of the internet, TV, radio-- these huge infrastructure and production projects employing thousands upon thousands, producing billions of dollars. Google, Facebook, other SV companies employing some of the brightest minds solving some of the biggest SW engineering challenges-- exist off of the value people put to ads.
In politics, it's all increasingly about advertising a feeling and less about the product (policy). Is it that strange that the guy who had the most air-time, shook people the most, and has most experience with being a screen personality won the last US presidential elections, when the population has, thought the years, learned to be susceptible to gut-advertising via constant, steady bombardment from the advertising industry?
I've concluded this is what a free market economy gets you, because as a company or producer optimizing for survival doesn't mean optimizing for being the best out there, just "seeming" the best.