RESEARCH & IDEAS

In Praise of Marketing
Published: February 5, 2009 Author: John Quelch Marketers do a surprisingly poor job of marketing Marketing, says professor John Quelch. "They do not appreciate, let alone articulate, the economic and social benefits of marketing." Here is the story that needs to be told. Key concepts include: • Seventeen million Americans engaged in marketing go about their daily work contributing brilliantly but often unknowingly to our quality of life. • Respectable marketers need to work harder to expose and shut down the charlatans. • Modern marketing is more than just selling. It involves design, branding, communication, and distribution. • Marketing is as much art as science, as much right brain as left brain. Editor's Note: Harvard Business School professor John Quelch writes a blog on marketing issues, called Marketing Know: How, for Harvard Business Online. It is reprinted on HBS Working Knowledge. Many dismiss marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in his 2007 book Consumed, claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other domain to sustain the sector devoted to consumption." He is correct. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party, trade union, church, or mosque. Indeed, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz sought to make his coffee shops the "third place" in our lives, after home and work. Marketing is an American success story. No country on earth is better at marketing than the United States. The latest Interbrand listing of the most valuable global brands reveals seven American brands in the top ten and sixty in the top hundred, more than twice the expected numbers based on the United States' command of 28 percent of the world economy.