It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.
Being able to find customers and explain your products value to them, that being marketing, is an essential part of producing a product.
This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.
If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.
Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.
I think that's far from guaranteed. It could very well be the case that the oldest, most established, solutions would dominate the top, for instance.
I think the situation is almost guaranteed to be worse because there are now stronger incentives to manipulate and deceive.
Product, price, place, promotion.
All of those are marketing. Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.
I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.
I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.
- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"
- "Drink Coca Cola"
The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.
But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.
Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.
Flipping the microscope, paid promotions distract from honest testimonials with no profit motive.
"We are improving your search results by prepending sales brochures."
Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.
When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.