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For the greater goods: the benefits of modern marketing and advertising are little understood and rarely appreciated. John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz of Harvard Business School on a remarkable American success that has helped the entire world.

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Marketing is one of the singular American success stories. No country on Earth is better at building brands and creating new consumers than the United States. The latest Interbrand listing of the most valuable global brands reveals 8 American brands in the top 10 and 52 in the top 100, more than twice the expected numbers based on America's cut of roughly a quarter of the world economy. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party or trade union. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz sought to make his coffee shops the "third place" in our lives, after home and work.

But many commentators have long been skeptical of the merit and virtue of marketing. Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and many others before and since them have dismissed marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption.

This criticism of marketing is with us still. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Benjamin Barber claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other domain to sustain the sector devoted to consumption." As long as businesses market goods, there will be critics wishing they would rein it in or cease altogether.

To set these critiques in their proper perspective, we must first understand how and why the United States achieved its extraordinary marketing dominance. The democratization of consumer access to products and services that emerged from American marketing muscle is a story of vision and innovation. Marketing has helped in the creation of a modern miracle: satisfying consumer needs at every income level. And it has done this in largely beneficial ways, by building trust, communicating and educating consumers, lowering costs, creating choices, and stimulating growth. In this way, marketing is one of the more striking economic--indeed, human--triumphs of our time.

The Emergence of Modern Marketing

Marketing by producers to consumers is as old as the bazaar, but modern marketing is more than just selling. It involves the design of products and services in response to consumer needs, latent or explicit. It requires branding these products and services, communicating their benefits to intermediaries and end consumers, and distributing them. All of these activities involve...

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