> The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use.
I mean, to look at your example again, in the United States, where technology gets adopted the quickest, 99% of bread sold is utterly disgusting (and expensive) and would be illegal to sell in many countries. A $100-150 automated bread maker fixes this, and yet they do not have mass adoption. Everything is marketing driven.
The reason you like the bread that you eat in your country is because it's the bread that you grew up with. While there are certainly some breads in the US that I don't like (mostly the mediocre-quality mass-produced stuff[0]), the variety of good bread is pretty amazing. If you don't like it, that's fine, you do you.
[0] Which is undoubtedly made by an automated bread maker, so I don't think using a machine "fixes" bread.
I mean, to look at your example again, in the United States, where technology gets adopted the quickest, 99% of bread sold is utterly disgusting (and expensive) and would be illegal to sell in many countries. A $100-150 automated bread maker fixes this, and yet they do not have mass adoption. Everything is marketing driven.