Critique - "All companies should invest heavily in advertising because high-quality advertisin can sell almost any product or service"

Why do companies such as Coke, Microsoft, Nike or Ferrari spend millions on advertising? A corollary to this would be “why all the successful companies spend so much on marketing”. Two simple words that can answer this are "Advertising sells". It not only targets customers as a conscious level, but also at the psychological level. Though investing money into advertising can make a product sell better, excessive advertising may not necessarily get the results intended. Moreover, every company needs a good and acceptable product. Further on, it will be clear, that though advertising increases sales, getting the right amount of it and advertising the right product are equally important factors.
Advertising is sometimes designed to target you at the subconscious level and it has amazing results. So investment in such techniques makes business sense. If you ever walk into a supermarket and decide to buy a chocolate in haste, what would you usually buy? Which name comes up in your mind? The name of a well know brand, that you have seen on advertised somewhere. Now here’s the interesting bit. Walk to the candy section and have a look. You would find the best know brands at arms length, while the unknown ones are like somewhere below. Why is it so? It's advertising targeting the customer at a unconscious level. Such is the power of this technique that it is rampant in countries like Australia, America and Europe.
Heavy spending on advertising can sometimes trigger an advertising war resulting in the investment targeting the rival and not the customer. Hence the investment is not fully realised. In such cases there is a lavish and wasteful spending by all companies involved. It eventually reaches a point where neither of the parties can back down leading to a advertising war. An excellent case of such rivalry took place in Australia between the two major telecom operators, Telstra and Optus. They ran campaigns directly targeting each others on topics like flaws in billing system, plans and coverage. So the advertising now is more about how bad the rival is, rather that about the product. So though investing heavily in advertising can get companies into the limelight it can sometimes spark a advertising war. We need to draw a line on what kind of advertising and how much of it is needed.
Companies need to put fair bit of though on whether the product will be accepted in the market. Now suppose we try to sell something that is socially not accepted then it going to be very difficult to get customer to buy it. A classic case of customer rejection would be the now famous margarine. Even though margarine is a good and successful product its initial launch was a complete disaster. How could such a superior product be a failure given that margarine taste was almost similar to butter? Unsuspecting people could not even pick the difference between the two. Investigations revealed the answer was in the colour. When margarine was initially launched, it was white in colour. No amount of advertising could convince people to buy it. So companies simply added colour and sold it. That’s the story of the now famous margarine. It’s obvious that advertising can make a difference to sales.
Investing in advertising is a wise decision for the right product from a sales point of view, however investing heavily in advertising may not necessarily be the right solution for every company.