Marketing has it's place, and it helps the shittiest crap sell despite itself, but it only goes so far, particularly with tangible longer-term pieces of engineering like automobiles. Something like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mouth_Billy_Bass will benefit greatly from marketing because it really doesn't need to be useful or even remotely nice to sell like crazy. But people have cars for years and spend a lot of time in them, so if the car sucks then no amount of marketing can save it.
The H2 wasn't all about marketing though. It was a grown man's Tonka Toy that made him think he was driving a real Humvie (which were awesome pieces of engineering in their day). It appealed hugely to the neanderthal over-compensating needle-dick crowd just by showing up on the market. And then when Schwartzenegger got one and when 50 Cent put dubs on his it became iconic... until gas prices skyrocketed. Another thing that helped it was that the leftist liberal treehuggers just absolutely hated it, so that made it even more appealing to many people. I bet they could have done 0 formal marketing and that repugnant POS would still have been successful.
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