I know how this sounds. Production, quality, R&D, supply chain — I'm not saying they don't matter, and I'll get the annoyed comments either way. But after a decade building marketing systems for businesses on more than one continent, here's the belief I'll defend in public: nothing you build sets your price. Perception does. And perception is marketing's job — not finance's, not operations', not R&D's. This isn't an India argument or a Canada argument. It's the same mechanism whether you're selling in Saskatoon, Dubai, Toronto, or Mumbai. The examples change. The mechanism doesn't.

Your product doesn't set your price. Your perception does.

In 2025, Apple shipped roughly 20% of the world's smartphones — and still walked away with something in the neighborhood of 80% of the entire industry's operating profit, according to Counterpoint Research. Read that again: one company, a fifth of the units, four-fifths of the money. Samsung, Xiaomi, and a dozen others are building phones that benchmark competitively, sometimes better, on paper. None of that matters, because paper specs were never what people were buying. They were buying what owning the phone says about them — and that belief was built, deliberately, over almost two decades of marketing, not engineering alone.

The most expensive mistake in marketing is a five-year plan you abandon in year three.

Here's a fact that should embarrass most marketing departments: the same illustrated girl in a polka-dot dress has been selling Indian butter since 1966. The Amul campaign holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuously running ad campaign on the planet — nearly 60 years, the same agency, the same mascot, the same tone, reacting to whatever's in the news that week. Amul's own leadership has said publicly they don't even pre-approve the ads before they run. That's not an accident. That's what "consistent for decades" actually looks like from the inside — boring, disciplined, and compounding, while competitors reinvented their brand voice every 18 months and wondered why nothing stuck.

Sometimes the smartest move a brand can make is to set its own inventory on fire.

In 2018, Burberry's annual report disclosed that it had physically destroyed £28.6 million (about $37–38 million USD) of unsold coats, bags, and perfume rather than sell them at a discount. It caused a genuine public scandal — Parliament asked questions, environmental groups piled on, and Burberry eventually committed to stop the practice. But notice what the decision protected: a Burberry trench coat has never been something you catch "on sale" at 40% off next to last season's stock. That scarcity — that unwillingness to let the brand be seen as discountable — is exactly the perception luxury brands are paying for when they burn goods instead of marking them down. It's an ugly tactic and I'm not endorsing the waste. I am telling you it wasn't incompetence. It was a very deliberate, very expensive way of protecting a price.

Being hated by half the internet can be the best marketing decision you make all year.

When Nike put Colin Kaepernick in its 2018 "Just Do It" anniversary campaign, the backlash was immediate — boycott hashtags, people burning their own Nike shoes on camera, a stock dip worth roughly $4 billion in a single day. Then the actual numbers came in: online sales jumped 31% over that Labor Day weekend compared to the year before, and Nike's market value rose by $6 billion in the following weeks, hitting an all-time high stock price. Nike didn't accidentally survive a controversial campaign. They correctly bet that the customers who'd be offended were never buying $150 basketball shoes at scale — and the customers who were, felt more seen than ever. That's not luck. That's knowing exactly whose perception you're building for and being willing to let everyone else be angry about it.

Even "we don't do marketing" is a marketing strategy — if the rest of the machine backs it up.

People love to bring up Tesla as the exception that disproves all of this: a company that famously spent close to $0 on traditional advertising for more than a decade while becoming the first automaker to cross a $1 trillion valuation. Except look at what replaced the ad budget — a founder with one of the largest personal followings on the planet functioning as a 24/7 earned-media engine, a direct-to-consumer retail model designed to control the entire brand experience, and products engineered to generate their own headlines (a car that goes to space is, functionally, the best ad ever made). Tesla didn't skip marketing. It just moved the entire budget out of the media-buying line and into product spectacle and founder visibility — which is precisely why, as competition from BYD and legacy automakers increased and Musk's personal brand grew more polarizing, Tesla quietly started running paid ads again in 2023. Even the company built on "we don't advertise" needed a marketing correction when the perception started slipping.

A city doesn't become a global destination because of good weather.

Dubai sits in a desert. There is no natural reason it should be one of the most recognized city brands on Earth. Emirates airline spends an estimated $200–300 million a year on marketing — sponsorships across football, cricket, and Formula 1, a fleet built as much for spectacle as for range — and roughly 30% of its passengers begin or end their trip in Dubai itself rather than just connecting through it. Industry commentators have half-joked that Emirates functions as "Dubai's unofficial marketing department with wings." A government building a skyline is infrastructure. An airline turning that skyline into something a Canadian, an American, and an Indian traveler all recognize on sight — that's marketing doing the work that concrete alone never could.

A coat that costs a fraction of $1,700 to produce still sells for $1,700 — and people are proud to wear it.

A Canada Goose Expedition Parka retails for roughly $1,700 CAD. Real inputs justify some of that — the down is genuinely Arctic-grade, the shell is a proprietary weatherproof fabric, and the jackets are sewn domestically in Winnipeg and Montreal instead of offshore, which is a real cost driver, not a myth. But domestic manufacturing and good materials don't fully explain why a Canada Goose parka reads as a status symbol on a Toronto street the way a technically comparable, far cheaper competitor never will. That gap between "genuinely well-made" and "objectively worth 3–4x a well-made alternative" is perception, built patiently over years of being the coat film crews and expedition teams actually wore before it became a downtown flex.

A steel watch can resell for double retail while a technically better movement sits ignored on the shelf next to it.

A steel Rolex Submariner uses a movement that, on pure horological merit, plenty of other manufacturers can match or beat for a fraction of the price. It doesn't matter. Specific in-demand Submariner references have resold for 100–150% of retail price on the secondary market, waitlist and all — a premium that has nothing to do with what's actually inside the case and everything to do with eight decades of deliberately engineered scarcity, sponsorship of the right sports, and a waiting list you can't buy your way past. That's not "the market is irrational." That's the market pricing in perception exactly as accurately as it prices in steel and jewels.

The fastest way to destroy 40 years of prestige is to put your name on anything that will pay you for it.

Pierre Cardin ran the opposite experiment, and it's now taught in marketing schools under the actual term "cardinization." By the late 1970s and into the '80s, the Pierre Cardin name had been licensed onto more than 800 products — toilet seat covers, canned sardines, bottled water, bicycle accessories. Revenue poured in. Prestige poured out just as fast. By the mid-90s, Women's Wear Daily was running quotes like "he has sold his name for toilet paper" and "at what point do you lose your identity?" Cardin proved, expensively and publicly, that you can absolutely monetize a brand into the ground — perception is an asset, and like any asset, it can be liquidated.

The single biggest mistake I see business owners make isn't underspending on marketing. It's not staying in one lane long enough for it to work.

This is the pattern, and it repeats identically whether the business is in Saskatoon, Sacramento, Dubai, or Delhi: an owner picks a position — a segment, a price point, a story — and it starts working. Then, twelve to thirty-six months in, someone in the room says some version of "we're leaving money on the table, let's also serve the customer one tier down." A cheaper line launches. The original positioning blurs. Three or four years of compounding brand equity gets diluted in a single product meeting. Real, durable perception — the Apple kind, the Amul kind, the Rolex kind — takes the better part of a decade of saying no to the adjacent, easier revenue. Almost nobody has the discipline to hold that line, which is exactly why the few who do end up owning the category instead of just participating in it.

I know exactly how biased this sounds — and I'd make the same argument anyway.

I run a marketing agency. Of course I think marketing is the most important department — ask a CFO and they'll say finance, ask an engineer and they'll say product, ask ops and they'll say supply chain, and every one of them would be describing something genuinely load-bearing. None of what's above works if the product is actually bad, if the supply chain can't deliver, if the R&D behind it is fake. I'm not arguing marketing replaces those things. I'm arguing that marketing is the only department whose entire job is deciding what the market believes those other things are worth — and belief, not spec sheets, is what sets the number on the price tag. Build the product properly. Then spend the next decade, not the next quarter, making sure the world knows exactly what it's looking at.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does this apply to a small local business, or only to global brands?

It applies more to a small business, not less. A global brand has enough scale to survive a few years of inconsistent marketing. A local business rarely does — every dollar and every year of positioning has to compound, because there's no advertising budget large enough to buy back a confused market position after the fact.

If marketing is so important, why do some companies succeed with almost no advertising?

Because they're still doing marketing — they're just not doing paid advertising. Tesla's zero ad-spend era still relied on a founder with a massive public platform, a direct-to-consumer retail model, and a product designed to generate earned media on its own. That's a marketing strategy with the media-buying line item removed, not the absence of one.

Isn't it risky to focus on perception over actually improving the product?

Perception without a product that can back it up collapses the first time a customer is disappointed — that's not a marketing failure, that's the product failing to justify the perception marketing built. The argument here isn't that product doesn't matter; it's that a great product with no perception behind it gets outsold by a good product with a strong one, every time, in every market.

What's the actual difference between marketing and advertising?

Advertising is one tool marketing uses — paying for placement. Marketing is the entire discipline of shaping what people believe about you: positioning, pricing, packaging, who you associate with, what you refuse to do. A company can spend zero on advertising and still be marketing constantly, the way Tesla and Patagonia both have.

Sources

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why marketing is important in business brand perception vs product quality how to price a product using perception marketing strategy for small business brand positioning consistency brand dilution examples
Written by Chandra Sg