Um...marketing is _part_ of the production process
I suspect that you believe that marketing is something that starts after the product is done and is ready to ship. It ain't that simple.
In any healthy company one of the primary roles of marketing is to get feedback about what existing and potential customers want, and then to take that back to the company and get that done. Any company whose marketing department cannot carry out this role either is a monopoly or is not long for the world.
Having marketing serve that role is not coercive. It is something other than trumpeting a fine product that many people have worked very hard to make. It is also a role that by its nature has little regard for the internals of how the products work and what the consequences are of satisfying every customer whim. This is true not just even of, but especially of well-done marketing. That is the role that I was talking about above.
That role immediately puts marketing into direct conflict with any kind of internal policy on things like release guidelines, testing, scheduling, and so on. It is not that marketing actively wishes to compromise these things, it is that they represent interests whose desires and needs do not take them into account. And in any healthy company both points of view have to be balanced, sometimes with one winning and sometimes with the other. The compromises may be small - particularly if the desired marketing message is closely aligned with technical implementation - but they are always present. Whether it is shipping a broken compiler, or going with a popular packaging format because it is what everyone else uses.
In Debian the marketing point of view is only present to the extent that core developers are themselves customers and so feel the customers' pain. The result - for good and bad - is that policy can be taken to lengths that would never be possible in a company that has to worry about the fact that customers are getting ticked off and going elsewhere. Use it for a while and you will see this in spades. Or go out and listen to complaints from users - almost inevitably they are a result of the effort that it takes to follow policy.
About this topic I won't speak more until and unless you actually try Debian and have the opportunity to see for yourself the advantages and disadvantages that come from not compromising on well thought-out policy for expediency. After you have that experience, then we can talk about whether any for-profit company that tried to hold such a rigid line could possibly survive long enough to see the benefits. (My opinion is that it could not - just as Debian could not if it had to pay for the time that it takes to implement it.)
But I will say one thing about another topic. Starbucks has extremely effective marketing. This is both good and bad. Some random links for you:
[link|http://www.thestranger.com/2001-10-11/city4.html|http://www.thestrang...-10-11/city4.html]
[link|http://www.jhu.edu/~newslett/02-3-00/Opinions/6.html|http://www.jhu.edu/~...0/Opinions/6.html]
[link|http://www.monochrom.at/cracked/comments/Starbucks.htm|http://www.monochrom...nts/Starbucks.htm]
[link|http://www.sallys-place.com/beverages/coffee/big_s.htm|http://www.sallys-pl.../coffee/big_s.htm]
My summary? They have figured out how to overcharge for an OK product. And they overcharge as much as they can, as often as they can. Their marketing is aggressive, but generally well enough done that it doesn't overtly look like marketing. So people don't mind...
Cheers,
Ben
"Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it\ufffds probably a fly."
- [link|http://www.nationalinterest.org/issues/58/Mead.html|Walter Mead]