Up and Out of Poverty


Book Description

In this book, legendary marketing expert Philip Kotler and social marketing innovator Nancy Lee consider poverty from a radically different and powerfully new viewpoint: that of the marketer. Kotler and Lee assess each proposed path to poverty reduction, from traditional large-scale foreign aid to improved education and job training, economic development to microfinance. They offer powerful new insights into why so many anti-poverty programs fail - and propose a new paradigm that can achieve far better results. Kotler and Lee show how to apply advanced marketing strategies and techniques - including segmentation, targeting, and positioning - to systematically put in place the conditions poor people need to escape poverty. Through real case studies, you'll learn how these marketing techniques can help promote health, education, community building, personal motivation, and more. The authors provide the first complete, marketing-informed methodology for addressing specific poverty-related problems - and assessing the results. They also demonstrate how national and local anti-poverty programs can be improved by more effectively linking government, NGOs, and private companies. Over the past 30 years, the authors' social marketing techniques have been successfully applied to health care, environmental protection, family planning, and many other social challenges. Now, Kotler and Lee show how they can be applied to the largest social challenge of all: global poverty.




Marketing to the Poor


Book Description

This book looks at markets in low-income economies and how they require fundamentally different marketing systems and strategies. Analyzing the sociocultural characteristics of these markets, it offers solutions for businesses to overcome spatial, institutional, and financial challenges while working in these contexts. Markets for the poor are characterized by resource scarcity, weak institutions, and low literary rates, as well as a strong presence of cultural and community ties. This book provides an understanding of these marketplaces, including the consumer’s wants and aspirations, the relationship of the individual within the social milieu, and their unique cultural contexts. It provides strategies for businesses to develop a bottom-up knowledge of global markets and incorporates practices which are inclusive and sustainable. It also explores the links between human development, entrepreneurship, and marketing which are especially relevant in the pandemic-hit global economy. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of marketing, business studies, business administration, rural management, marketing management, economics, and development studies.







Marketing's Role in Addressing the Poor as Customers


Book Description

There are upwards of 3.0 billion poor people in the world. Development assistance and social programs adding up to more than $1 trillion dollars per year are directed at these consumers to lift them out of poverty. But the effectiveness of this massive effort is questionable, given the rising number of poor (according to World Bank data). The reasons for the slow progress, of course, are complex and have to do with failures in social and economic policy, as well as management. In this paper we focus on management and one aspect of marketing. We argue that the marketing discipline has a crucial role to play in this poverty alleviation effort. We offer three avenues for exploration. First, we suggest that the poor people should be viewed as customers (and not beneficiaries), and that they should be the judge of whether a program creates value. While acknowledging that in many cases the value of the donors and customers could converge, we advocate that the "customer's value" serve as the benchmark. Second, we urge social marketers to take on the challenge of social change programs, especially the ones that offer a social benefit at private cost. While such a program can be made to appeal to an individual's societal nature, much more can be achieved if the program is oriented to deliver private benefit as well. Finally, we urge the marketing discipline to carve out a facilitator's role in resource allocation debates underlying much of infrastructural economic development projects. Marketing's involvement has been at a superficial input level providing equipment and services. It has a much more important role in bringing the voice of the poor people to the value creation and allocation process.




Making Market Systems Work for the Poor


Book Description

'The M4P approach fosters understanding of the functions and players within market systems and how these can be strengthened in order to better serve the needs of the poor.' Alan Gibson. This collection, all inspired in some way by Gibson's teachings, is essential reading for practitioners, funders, consultants, academics, and policymakers.




The Business Solution to Poverty


Book Description

Authors Paul Polak and Mal Warwick describe their Zero-Based Design of starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor to show how their design principles and vision can enable unapologetic capitalists to supply the very poor with clean drinking water, electricity, irrigation, housing, education, health care, and other necessities at a fraction of the usual cost and at profit margins attractive to investors.




The Low-Income Consumer


Book Description

Product, price, promotion and place: these are the four key areas in which marketing influences consumers. This innovative book takes the stance that poor consumers are distinctly disadvantaged in each of these areas. Documenting the imbalance of the exchange process by describing the business practice of those who market to poor consumers, issues related to basic necessities such as food, housing and transportation are addressed, as well as the consumption of `sin' products by poor consumers. The problems faced by those who target low-income consumers are also examined, including the conflict between sound marketing practices and marginally ethical or unethical applications of those practices. The final section of the book




Marketing to the Low-Income Consumer


Book Description

This book is unique in several ways. First, it focuses on marketing to low-income consumers, but not those in extreme poverty. Consumers earning income around the poverty line are a sizable group in nearly every country. Often, major marketing textbooks tend to assume that consumers are at least middle class, and as a consequence, most of them do not even include the low-income audience. Second, this book contextualizes the low-income consumer within the marketing discipline. It considers the low-income consumers who engage voluntarily in market exchanges. These consumers differ significantly from those in extreme poverty who, as a group, are not sufficiently attractive to most corporate businesses. In turn, those who live in extreme poverty demand substantial attention from major social endeavors. However, the low-income consumers can be better served if businesses give them proper analytical attention. Third, this book embraces the profit motivation, assuming that marketing without profit goals cannot sponsor arguments for poverty subjects over any other claims. It also supports the idea that marketing cannot address poverty by demanding businesses sacrifice profit to benefit a new stakeholder. Fourth, no other book explores the topic of poverty from a marketing perspective like this. It borrows concepts from other disciplines and molds them to marketing thought. By doing this, it develops a unique vocabulary for poverty, which is essential for marketing to be comprehensive. This approach avoids sending students to other schools where poverty knowledge lacks the appropriate business perspective. It also helps readers understand the poverty concepts within the marketing discipline.




Voice and Advocacy


Book Description

Of the nearly six billion inhabitants of this planet, nearly three billion may be classified as poor. Many who live on the edgesof poverty do not experience markets and market exchanges, which are the very backbone of much of marketing practiceand scholarship as we know it today. This paper makes the argument that social marketing has a role to play here on behalf of poor customers through interestrepresentation and customer advocacy. A stakeholder model of value creation and resource allocation is presented as anexample of how marketing's expertise could contribute to more effective and equitable ways to alleviate poverty. This is afar more pro-active role in social change than what the marketing discipline has been hitherto accustomed to. A differentkind of social marketing paradigm is proposed, one aimed at changing lives rather than influencing customer choices. Thepaper proposes that marketing follow a model of social activism, which can mediate the interests of downstream customersand upstream funders via the heuristic of voice and advocacy. Marketing professionals to practitioners are urged to create arepresentative voice for poor customers in policy deliberation, program design, and field execution.




Challenges in Marketing Socially Useful Goods to the Poor


Book Description

Market based solutions to alleviate poverty have become increasingly popular in recent years. Unfortunately, there are very few examples of profitable businesses that market socially useful goods in low-income markets and operate at a large scale. This article examines in-depth three case studies of multinational firms that tried to market unquestionably useful products -- clean water, eyeglasses, and nutritious yoghurt -- to the poor, and did not succeed commercially. The overarching lesson we draw from the case studies is that developing strategies for marketing socially useful goods to the poor, far from triggering a revolution in business thinking, requires firms to get back to the basic principles and rules of economics and business.