How Marketing Can Reduce Worldwide Poverty

On the face of it, social marketing is a cinch.
Here's one scenario. You as a marketer want people who are living in poverty to take better care of their health. So, given your profession, what do you do? You can persuade them—through public service announcements, colorful leaflets, and on-the-ground advocacy—to go get a free eye exam or a blood pressure check-up. Easy. Your basic principles of sales and promotion will carry the day.
If your charge is minimizing smoking or drug use, well, your job becomes rather more complicated. Still, your experience in sales and promotion may give you some insights, à la the "Just Say No" campaign.
But let's say your goals are a good deal more ambitious. You care about benefiting society as a whole. You want to help people stuck in grinding poverty. You want to know what villagers think about a dam proposal for their valley. Or that loan to spur agriculture. Or the supermarket going up in the inner city. What can a marketing background say to you when your goal is not to sell Coca-Cola, but to offer a better existence to people on the edge?
That's the puzzle facing HBS professor V. Kasturi "Kash" Rangan and research associate Arthur McCaffrey. It's also one they are passionate about and determined to solve. As they write in a new working paper that they're preparing for an academic journal, there are more than three billion people in the world who may be classified as poor. What does the marketing profession have to say to them?
Rangan, head of the HBS faculty marketing unit, has been wrestling with the limits of social marketing for a decade. McCaffrey was so impressed by a talk Rangan gave several years ago on "marketing to the poorest customers" that he campaigned to work alongside him. They readily admit that they're no pioneers. James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, for example, has advocated a variation of social marketing, and it's a common—though they believe often ill-applied—topic in development.
But together the two are pushing the envelope of what social marketing can do about world poverty. They want to move social marketing beyond mere sales and promotion. They insist that eliminating poverty requires all the complex skills the marketing profession can bring to bear.

 

very true.

what marketing can do is spread the word very effectively and if done effectively will inspire peoples emotions that is the goal since most people live on e-motion so the trick is to find a way that first gets peoples emotions boiling and will cause them to take action.

the next step is to overthrow some of the poor countries governments. Since the leaders of the countries are the real problems in poverty. The people in the poorer countries have little democratic possibilities and are oppressed.