In the 80’s, I worked at a retail furniture store. If you wanted to be a successful furniture store in the 80’s, you ran double truck ads in the newspaper every week. You were on the radio with a nauseating jingle every hour of the day. Drive traffic to the store. Have salespeople ready to pounce when the customer walks through the door, except one guy. Murray never took walk-ins on Saturday because he had booked himself solid all day with customers that had been referred to him by happy customers the week before. Interestingly, Murray was always the top salesman because he had built himself a business within the business of his employer. Also, if you think about it, if his employer stopped advertising, all of the other salespeople would have no one to talk to and essentially be out of business, but Murray could keep getting his referrals and keep making sales.
Murray had a system. He called his customers. If you bought a living room set from Murray, you were gonna get a call from him each of the first three months that you had the set and every year for the rest of your life (or in this case, Murray’s life. He died a few years ago. Good guy!) His customers believed that he cared. They would have followed him wherever he went. He didn’t need advertising. He had his evangelists.