Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Coffin

Coffin’s line flatters the engineer’s dream: build something so undeniably good that persuasion becomes redundant. It’s a crisp rebuke to the modern economy’s loudest sin, the idea that hype can stand in for substance. The intent isn’t anti-marketing so much as anti-theater. He’s drawing a boundary between marketing as translation (helping people find what genuinely solves their problem) and marketing as camouflage (helping people tolerate what doesn’t).

The subtext is a wager on inevitability: quality creates its own demand, word of mouth becomes a distribution channel, customers do the sales pitch for you. That’s a seductive belief, especially for makers who’d rather refine than pitch. The quote works because it weaponizes humility - “you don’t have to be a great marketer” - while still smuggling in a boast: if your product is right, the world will notice.

Context matters, though. Coffin wrote in an era when “right” could plausibly mean durable, useful, clearly better, and markets were less saturated with near-identical options. Today, being “right” can be invisible without narrative, timing, and placement. The best products still fail when people can’t discover them, can’t afford them, don’t trust the brand, or can’t switch from what they already use. Coffin’s provocation lands because it reminds us what marketing is supposed to serve: the product. It also needles the anxious suspicion that if you need constant promotion, you may be compensating for something you should have fixed upstream.