Final answer:
Marketing primarily creates value by differentiating products and influencing consumer perceptions, leading to increased sales and profits for firms.
Step-by-step explanation:
The main thing marketing creates is value. Marketing and advertising play a crucial role in the attention economy by not only promoting products but also by creating and communicating value to consumers. Firms use advertising to differentiate their products from competitors' products, affecting consumer perception and demand. These strategies can make a firm's perceived demand curve more inelastic or shift the demand curve to the right. This can result in the firm selling a greater quantity of products or charging a higher price, thereby increasing profits. Marketing also contributes to increasing commodity consumption in industrial societies by attaching specific meanings to commodities, often suggesting that they possess transformative powers. This is evident in the vast array of differentiated products available in a market-oriented economy.