Agreed, t but companies like Sound United who own Denon, Marantz and many other brands could sell direct and bypass the dealers! Customer would get much better pricing.
why would customers get better pricing?
If anything, Sound United would pocket a lot more profit... The argument you are making is that brands that are established and can afford to effectively "stop advertising", can then move to a direct model based on current name recognition.
Allowing that condition to be true, you have to consider the market conditions for AV receivers...
I'd argue that it isn't an elastic market, in fact, it's probably rather inelastic. Meaning that demand isn't driven as much by price. In other words, if Sound United could save all those costs, not advertise, and sell the same number of units, why would they lower the price? they are leaving money on the table. Look at car sales in the pandemic. surplus fees were added...
The argument would be that lowering price would drive additional demand. I'd argue that's where the AV market isn't elastic. I have a Marantz 6014, and an Outlaw 5000x. If Sound United dropped prices by 50%, I wouldn't buy new gear. Mine works just fine in its current application. It's like the car analogy. Even if cars were 50% cheaper, I wouldn't be buying... my car is paid off, runs fine, and has a lot of life/reliability left.
Will some people buy that wouldn't have? Sure. Enough to justify "losing" some of the profit on sales they would have made anyway? Probably not. But, that's why companies hire analysts and actuaries to calculate a lot of that out for them to optimize all those parameters. Trust me, companies that are fairly sizable have put way more thought, analysis, and data science into these things than you give them credit for.
I work for an insurance company. probably 1-2% of our gross income is spend on properly pricing our products. that sounds like nothing to most, but think of it this way... roughly 90% of what is taken in is planned to be paid out in claims. 10-20% of what's leftover is used to price things correctly... that's a lot... and in $$$, that works out to ~$250 million for a $25B company... and if you pay analyst/actuaries $200k/year in salary.... you have 1250 on staff... full time... thinking about how to do this right..
So does your theory have merit? Sure.
Do people way smarter than us already know these answers... Yep....
Is there an illuminati? Maybe, but they aren't secretly controlling the AV industry, lol