Aggressive marketing is sort of defecting in a prisoner's dilemma; a society where marketing was limited to making all relevant information about products publicly accessible would save a lot of resources invested by the producers into marketing and by the customers trying to tell apart truth and falsity contained in the ads.
It is true that if you want to spread your product as far as possible, aggressive marketing may be indispensable. But to present this fact in a moralising manner as in the quoted text - an obligation whose rejection only indicates vanity and selfish desires - seems inappropriate.
If we were starting from zero marketing, then some amount of marketing - say, a Sears catalog so I can tell what goods are actually being sold - is indisputably positive sum. It matches consumers with what they want to buy. But certainly there reaches a point where the competition becomes zero/negative-sum and you get the tragedy-of-the-commons you describe.
Much the same can be said of status competition - there's beneficial social skills "How to mediate a dispute" "how to accurately convey emotional information," "how to make small talk," but you continue to get selfish benefits after you pass well into zero/negative sum territory.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/
Surprising material to discover on Less Wrong, I know, but has some core insights about effectiveness and entrepreneurship and freelancing which I think people here will appreciate.
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