This week, an entrepreneur said something that stuck with me. He believes that marketing is an accelerant, meaning that whatever was going to happen anyway still happens, but faster. His caveat: it cuts both ways. If a company’s product or service is great, marketing pulls forward the number of people who buy and enjoy it. It accelerates building a positive reputation and a loyal customer base. If a company’s product or service isn’t great, it pulls forward the number of people who dislike it. It accelerates how fast the company builds a negative reputation and the number of people who don’t want to buy what the company is selling.

His point was that marketing can do a lot, but it can’t save you from a bad product or service. He suggests that before beginning to market heavily, you should make sure that what you’re marketing is something of quality. If you market a subpar product or service heavily, you could be accelerating the demise of your company.