You know, I see this market adoption sentiment everyday and I have to ask, if people don't know about the product, how can they adopt it? Believe it or not, marketing can make or break a coin. A quick stroll down the alt coin list shows as much. I'm not even talking about the pump and dumps. See Quark, Max, vert and the like.
Yeah but Max had TV airtime and youtube exposure through Keiser, and despite this massive awareness it's a few places down in coinmarketcap compared to DRK. If you beat a coin with TV awareness with no marketing whatsoever, you must be doing something right + you have the potential to explode if you market yourself (while the other has already passed that point).
Personally, I prefer the concept of spreading awareness in the right places, rather than marketing/promotion (which can be considered spamming/hyping/pumping if aggressive) because indeed there is a need for people to know what it's about, but, right now, we simply have a beta and it needs tweaking before getting finalized. Impressions count and if you are promoting a half-baked product, it may create the wrong impression. For example in a beta network that does like 1 test transaction per hour the mixing is not hard to trace. But in a network that does thousands of transactions per day, that's another issue altogether.
Btw, I believe there'll have to be some hardening work, preferably a public call coupled with a good bounty, so that hackers can take a shot at the implementation and uncover potential holes before we go 100% live - or even have the bounty running even after we go 100% live (post-beta). That can also serve as a "rumor-hardening" for later stages of marketing. What I mean by that is this: When you have a complicated feature like DarkSend and most people do not really understand how it works (but are invested nonetheless), one comment that "it's broken" can cause significant fluctuation in prices. There is, in effect, a social engineering approach against the weaknesses of the market players (playing against their ignorance with your supposed superior knowledge).
The existence of an open bounty can counteract this effect: "Hey mr FUDer, if you are so good as a hacker and discovered the X flaw, then why don't you go and collect the bounty instead of spreading FUD?"... That's a safeguard right there.