This is always a conundrum to me. If you spend no money at all on marketing, you get no customers and your business grinds to a halt. Yet, for every dollar you spend on marketing, the return is only pennies on the dollar.
That's not even remotely true. While it's certainly possible to squander marketing dollars doing something dumb, properly done marketing has a substantial ROI. Let me give you an example which is close to a lot of the people here. Take any software company. Microsoft, Oracle, etc, it doesn't matter which one. Look on their income statements. You'll see that engineering accounts for about 10%-20% of their total costs. The majority of the rest of the cost of these very profitable enterprises is sales, marketing and administration. Their net profit margins will be somewhere between 15%-30%. How is this possible if they were taking a loss on marketing and sales which accounts for close to half of all their expenses? This business model would make no sense at all if the return on marketing and sales was pennies on the dollar. In actual fact it is about a 2X or 3X multiple return on money invested in marketing. Sometimes more.
Companies don't dump lots of money into marketing because they are stupid. They do it because it brings a substantial return on the money invested in it. If it didn't work then there would be no reason to ever market anything.