Created for fun is a marketing gimmick. Doge was created as a scam. But very soon they decided to add big enough tail emission so they make that scam premine irrelevant. Doge is just a normal coin. Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin and 1000 others. Copying Bitcoin. Nothing fun, nothing meme nothing, ... A working transparent ledger coin with known issues that such coins have.
I actually see what you say is an undeniable necessity, that it could be that their marketing / sales have done something for purposes that we don't know.
For me, it is strange that people like @elomusk have joined the coin doge issue, with the statement.
doge really is no different from other coins and we will wait for the continuation of the doge story which is quite phenomenal at this time.
I think the part where it is just "marketing" is not really true, because it was actually loved by people even though they knew everything about it, it is really just a thing that people used not for investment but for fun and that was the selling point of it. There were thousands of donations to charities and it was really huge sums of money, people bought dogecoin and sent that dogecoin to charities and so forth, most of the time one person or one organization collected all that doge coin and sold it for fiat and donated the money.
So yes, it was sort of marketing in that sense, but the reality is that marketing wasn't done in a way that people would be promoting doge, it was done in a way that people promoted what they did with doge, and there is a difference between both of them. I was part of it years ago when it came out and helped some people and donated about 50 bucks for examples, I really felt better about myself, that is the reason doge became something when it first came out.