Take the iPhone

People often mix marketing and sales. For me marketing is about "understanding your market". You wanted an iPhone because His Steveness knew what many people were looking for in a phone. (The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).

Marketing is the process of finding out what people want, how to make it, and then how to communicate to them that the thing you made is that. Even if Steve never crossed your path, his marketing process is how Apple arrived at the product you wanted.

So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs) and not about "marketing" (how to define the markets for a product and why people in these marketing will buy it...). As I understand it, for example, there's markets for "broken watches": it can be * broken luxury watches: to have a "rich man look" without paying the full price * for hobbyist watch-repair * for professional watch ressellers (after repair) * for educational / museum... As far as design is concerned, the watch is broken. But it can be sold if you find who will buy it and why... and that's marketing Jobs was a great designer too... (and/or knew how to hire great designers and let them get out the best of them)

Remember during this time he and Apple were riding high on the success of the iPod. So when he drums up excitement about being just as revolutionary with phones, people listened.

It existed at all because Steve Jobs convinced the people working on it to believe in it enough to care. This is really rare, most people don't care (and are rational not to) but it is required to make any great product