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Excerpt from Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy, by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz, ($35, Harvard Business Press, 2008).

The vast majority of marketing is good for individual consumers, good for firms and good for society. Marketplace exchanges are based on mutual trust between buyers and sellers--they create value for both parties; the billions of daily marketplace transactions are a large part of the glue that holds societies together. Good marketers offer consumers choices. Choice stimulates consumption and economic growth and enables personal expression. Good marketers provide consumers with information about new products and services.

Additionally, good marketers engage consumers and make them partners in the production and consumption of brands. Good marketers also reach beyond the wealthy elites and imagine how to bring expensive innovations to the mass market. Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) and Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) are much maligned, but their missions are inclusive: to "lower the cost of living of everyone everywhere" and "to organize the world's information and make it accessible to everyone."

A powerful force for democracy is the mission adopted by many good marketers: to enable poor consumers around the world to enjoy the advantages of the developed world's innovations at lower-than-ever prices. Efforts to mass-produce a standard $20 mobile phone by consolidating orders from mobile operators around the world and to mass-produce a $100 personal computer to deliver one laptop per child are reminiscent of Henry Ford's one-size-fits-all black Model T. The objective is to bridge the digital divide and open new opportunities and life choices to poor consumers in the same way that the marketing of refrigerators saved on shopping trips, expanded food choices, and improved food safety for middle-class European and U.S. households in the 20th century. Such initiatives require not only creative product design but often new distribution and service-support models.

We believe that marketing itself is marketed poorly and that the social value created by the 17 million Americans who are employed in marketing deserves more credit. The fault is largely with marketers themselves. They should be more conscious of the social importance of their work and of the moral principles that underpin their daily decisions. Marketers are most comfortable judging marketing as a business practice, where the issue is how well a particular marketing tool, technique or process helps a business meet its objectives. But marketers also need to consider the impact of marketing on individual consumers, the marketplace and society.

We have argued that the same six benefits--exchange, consumption, choice, information, engagement and inclusion--that characterize good democracy characterize good marketing. But turning the argument around, we have also asked how well modern democracies live up to the standards set by good marketing. We conclude that they fall short in many ways and could improve by borrowing from marketing's best practices.

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