I think marketing is one factor for success, quality is another, but an under-appreciated third one is just getting more shots on goal until one finally succeeds.
I think this is one of the most under-appreciated explanations of why American-style capitalism succeeded where soviet-style communism failed. In theory, communism is more economically efficient, as you don't have multiple companies duplicating work and re-inventing variations on the same idea. In practice, it's much harder to judge an idea than a finished product, so the best way to make a good product is to do it by evolution, not up-front design. If the whole country is oriented around making X happen, X must happen, whether it is a good idea or not.
In general, markets are a really elegant solution to the allocation of goods. It’s really difficult to plan out how steel should be allocated or how many pairs of shoes we should make this year.
Even worse, many Soviet factories were incentivized to lie about the quantity of goods produced or sacrifice quality to meet quotas. So as a first order, approximation, markets are really nice solution to this.
Of course there are many known market failures, which can disrupt such a fragile system if not addressed. For example, monopolies and information asymmetries.
Some people also believe that part of the failures of the planned economy was a limitation of the technology at the time. Without computers, it wasn’t that easy to track the outputs of factories to enforce quality. Those people argue that a modern day planned economy might look a little bit more like Amazon does internally. Maybe still not a great place to live though.
I think this is one of the most under-appreciated explanations of why American-style capitalism succeeded where soviet-style communism failed. In theory, communism is more economically efficient, as you don't have multiple companies duplicating work and re-inventing variations on the same idea. In practice, it's much harder to judge an idea than a finished product, so the best way to make a good product is to do it by evolution, not up-front design. If the whole country is oriented around making X happen, X must happen, whether it is a good idea or not.