Aside from being useful to enough number of people to sustain the coin, good advertising strategy also plays a critical role in the survival of the cryptocurrency. The features and function of the crypto would be not useful if the public does not even know it is existing.
That's usually the real problem here and people always forget that recognition by the community means a lot. It doesn't matter if your product is as good as those released by big companies but what's more important is the marketing strategy. You can have the shittiest coin ever existed and if you can get the marketing right people would still use the coin anyway. So in the case of coin, utilization is really important and I can't deny that but so is marketing strategy.