If incumbents would be favored then it stands to reason that total advertising spend would be at least loosely proportional to market decentralization. Yet in America advertising spend has increased many orders of magnitude since the 50s, while the market has simultaneously become dramatically more centralized.
By contrast in parts of the world with relatively negligible advertising, markets tend to be heavily decentralized.
And I think this makes far more sense of you think about it. If you make a soft drink that is rated far higher than Coke in blind testings, or perhaps one that is near indistinguishable in flavor, but cheaper, you stand very little chance of competing successfully. There's a reason Coke spends billions per year in advertising, and it has nothing to do with reaching the three remaining people who are not aware Coke exists.
And yeah without advertising the "free" services on the internet wouldn't exist, replaced by a mixture of genuinely free services, and for-pay. This would IMO be a dramatically better state of affairs. Businesses whose actual customer is not the people using their product/service leads to such dystopic nonsense.
By contrast in parts of the world with relatively negligible advertising, markets tend to be heavily decentralized.
And I think this makes far more sense of you think about it. If you make a soft drink that is rated far higher than Coke in blind testings, or perhaps one that is near indistinguishable in flavor, but cheaper, you stand very little chance of competing successfully. There's a reason Coke spends billions per year in advertising, and it has nothing to do with reaching the three remaining people who are not aware Coke exists.
And yeah without advertising the "free" services on the internet wouldn't exist, replaced by a mixture of genuinely free services, and for-pay. This would IMO be a dramatically better state of affairs. Businesses whose actual customer is not the people using their product/service leads to such dystopic nonsense.