In my recollection, Perl 6 did not start with marketing. It started out of frustration because of several problems that were needed to be solved to move forward with Perl 5, and solving those problems would mean breaking backward compatibility. It started with a cup-throwing moment. With groups of people sitting around and discussing and writing down things that needed to change. It took quite some time before marketing came into it.

Looking back to those years, I still think that when more people would have joined in, helping development of Perl 6, a functioning programming language could have come into existence before Pugs was made by Audrey Tang. If more people would have joined in to for instance convert a lot of modules from Perl 5 to Perl 6, to make a grammar in Perl 6 to execute Perl 5 code, both Perl 5 and Perl 6 would have benefited greatly. Instead, many people felt betrayed, and I remember mostly from those years a lot of flame-wars and a lot of people leaving and not returning.

Marketing... I still have stickers and buttons that say "we suck at marketing". We really do. Looking back at my own efforts in marketing Perl (5|6), I wonder how that money, time and energy could have been used better. Marketing for Perl has never been an impressive thing. I doubt more marketing would have improved a lot: we needed educational materials so Perl could be taught at schools and universities, talks about Perl at big conferences, articles about Perl in important magazines, etc, and I have been at brainstorm sessions to make overviews of what needed to be done, and we just did not have enough volunteers to do these things, or money to hire people to get them done.

Most of those problems from the beginning still exist in Perl 5, and breaking backward compatibility still causes anger, as was shown with the changes in smart match by Zefram.

I still love Perl. Both Perl 5 and Raku.