I’ve met quite a number of businesses who told me that they have never needed to do marketing, all of their business would come from doing great work and being recognized and recommended for it.
Which means that most of these businesses are actually doing quite a lot of marketing. They make useful things that beautifully solve people’s struggles and they make it easy to spread the word.
That’s the foundation of any good marketing.
Advertisements and other forms of communication are amplifiers. They work best (and are way easier) if the foundation is great. But it’s not all of marketing. It’s the topping.