Should you spend money on product promotion or you should allow your product to promote your company?

When you think of successful clothing brands, I am sure you suddenly think of ZARA, Mango, BCBGAMAXARIA. Yes, we all know those names and we can identify their brand everywhere we go. This has been a result of their good marketing strategy and product positioning. Those companies have spent a fortune on advertisements and season campaigns with famous models and actors with the main idea to create a symbol of their product. Take for example H&M. A couple of years ago they launched a multi dollar campaign with the pop icon Madonna. She was their model for the spring/summer season collection. Even though this was a very risky and expensive campaign, it had a huge success. Sales rose sharply and H&M had a huge increase in revenues. If somebody asks me to give an example for a successful campaign, I would give this one as an example. The clothing magnate wanted to expand their target market reaching to all kind of people, from different ages. Using Madonna as a face of the store, H&M wanted to show that they offer low prices but at the same time good quality of clothing and most of all STYLE.
There are other examples of companies that do not spend such substantial amount of money for advertising campaigns and still have great popularity and many customers. Take for example the clothing brand 'Primark', which is really popular in the United Kingdom. If I have to make a comparison between the policy of 'Primatk' and 'H&M', I would say for sure that 'Primark' has a completely different perspective of how they should mark their products. They have the opinion that huge ad campaign with celebrities are useless and not necessary. Maybe you would think that high revenue is not possible without advertising. Here, we should distinguish what we mean under advertising. You can either advertise your product or your product can advertise you. In the case of 'Primark' they have chosen the second path. They do invest in product quality and store design but they don't spend money on country wide ads or banners across towns. Their low prices ( and when i say low, i really mean it) are their most precious marketing tool. Everybody know that you can go there and buy clothing with good quality for very, very low prices. As a result of that the sales are massive, followed by 12% increase in revenues for 2009, which is 7 % more than the economic increase of Africa.
As a conclusion I would like to say, that they way you present your products does not need to be connected with huge ad campaigns and many celebrities. At the end the majority of customers are looking for quality and reasonable pricing and this could be provided in simply investing in your product rather than spending money on tv ads and posters.