To be honest, I got a sense of that after I dove into thread … and after I wrote my post. 
:o
I’m willing to double down though. There’s nothing wrong with anti-marketing rants in the appropriate thread. Which that was. And marketing isn’t identical to capitalism. In Britain for example there’s a lot of marketing but it isn’t quite so inane as the stuff in the US. Bottled water isn’t a bad case study.
I concede that AB might lack a certain perspective on his subject matter. eg:
They exploit certain cognitive peculiarities of the human psyche. Some of them are rationalizable (investment in advertising signals that the seller cares about its reputation). But mostly they are an exploit. But exploits are baked into humanity and are unique to one economic system or another. It’s difficult to draw appropriate policy conclusions from this, unless you are yammering for more education. And in that case, a lower key might be appropriate.
It is true that market systems encourage a race to the bottom or at least a race to a regulated baseline. Companies without marketing departments trend towards unsustainability. You can’t just pretend that a better system is obvious, because it really isn’t, given even a modest amount of thought.
My take is that buying bottled water is a dubious activity and morally suspect in the absence of greenhouse gas fees. Once those are put in place though, buying bottled water becomes a consumer choice like any other. Not that I would expect the industry to be destroyed by rational CO2 pricing.