Can you make great products and have success without focusing on marketing?

>They came out on the same day, they have the same budget for production, gorgeous well-known actors, but there is one big difference. Directors spent $150 million on the marketing of Barbie, while $145 million was spent on the creation. Oppenheimer did not allocate such a budget for marketing.

Interesting, because I've heard about the Oppenheimer movie but not about the Barbie movie. The only time I've heard about the movie is after the fact, via the comparison with the Oppenheimer movie. I might not be the target audience, but it completely was stealth.

I have watched none of them yet.

>Marketing is an amazing tool, especially when it is handled by a team of professionals, so if the product is great, then it is strange to neglect it. But is it possible to make a cool product without focusing on marketing?

What's no marketing? It is developing a product in secret, in a bunker somewhere, and never telling someone about it. How will people who have the problem your product solves, i.e: the market, know about it? If the market doesn't know about it, where will sales come from? That's akin to someone who never gets out of the house and complains about being an "Incel". Not putting your product out there leads to "InSale" (just came up with this).

Not only that, but how will you know that your product actually solves the problem you think it's solving if you don't expose it to the market and target audience? You have to reduce that risk by exposing your product to the market and reality as early as possible. Maybe your target audience just doesn't really care about spending money on solving that problem and only complain about it? How will you improve the product/discover bugs if there isn't an influx of people using it, and how will they use it if they have never heard of it.

Saying marketing is a tool is like saying sales is a tool.

I think it is about "it".

Barbie is a light and fun movie, and a shorter movie than Oppenheimer. I have a PhD in physics, I have been to the Trinity site, I've been exposed to the story of the atom bomb over and over again, there is nothing new about it for me. So I went to see Barbie and didn't see Oppenheimer.

That said, the "overnight success" without marketing is a matter of being lucky, you really do want to make your own luck with marketing.

No. Marketing is not just ads, it is your compass, which give you direction, where your great product should be. Without compass you will just lost, and throw resources to make something which is not need.