 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | "Philip Kotler, pioneer in social marketing, and Nancy Lee bring their incisive thinking and pragmatic approach to the problems of behavior change at the bottom of the pyramid. Creative solutions to persistent problems that affect the poor require the tools of social marketing and multi-stakeholder management. In this book, the poor around the world have found new and powerful allies. A must read for those who work to alleviate poverty and restore human dignity." --CK Prahalad, Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor, Ross School of Business, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, 5th Anniversary Edition "Helping others out of poverty is a simple task; yet it remains incomplete. Putting poverty in a museum is achievable within a short span of time--if we all work together, we can do it!" --Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace and Managing Director, Grameen Bank "As an MBA student at Wharton in the 1970s, Philip Kotler's textbook was the marketer's Bible. Now, decades later, Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee have made a profound contribution to understanding and addressing the blight of global poverty. Marketing seems an unlikely weapon in the fight against poverty. But poverty is affected by behavioral choices, and behavior is influenced by information. Social marketing views the poor as rational consumers of information who change their behaviors when presented with information in a compelling way...the very thing marketers do so well, whether selling the benefits of a toothpaste that prevents cavities or those of bednets which can prevent malaria." --Rich Stearns, President, World Vision US "Kotler and Lee set the record straight in this important book: Social marketing uses a range of tools to influence behavior and reduce poverty, beyond simply the sale of subsidized commodities like condoms and mosquito nets. Kotler's pioneering work in this field continues to inspire practitioners." --Karl Hofmann, President and Chief Executive Officer of PSI (Population Services International) "Up and Out of Povertywill prove very helpful to antipoverty planners and workers to help the poor deal better with their problems of daily living. Philip Kotler and Nancy R. Lee illustrate vivid cases of how the poor can be helped by social marketing solutions." --Mechai Viravaidya, founder and Chairman, Population and Community Development Association, Thailand |
Average Customer Rating:  Great overview of applying marketing concepts to solving social problems Poverty, whether the abject destitute poverty in the developing world, or relative poverty in the developed world, is the scourge of mankind - resulting in wasted lives, unfulfilled potential, disease, and early death. Many experts have proposed methods for reducing poverty, all of which are offered in earnest, and have shown some degree of success (Bottom of the Pyramid, property rights, NGO funding, government funding, direct payments, microfinance, and so on), but none of them has proven to be the magic bullet to solve the problem. Here, Kotler and Lee don't disagree with these other programs, instead, they put them into a framework that has proven successful at everything from selling breakfast cereal to smoking cessation - marketing.
By using the marketing framework of the 4 Ps, segmentation, and understanding the customer, solutions can be put into place to maximize benefits for the greatest number of people. As someone with a marketing degree, I understand the concepts, but never thought about using them in a social setting. Anyone interested in poverty or social programs should pick up this book and think about how to apply its contents to their work.
I find there are many people who are passionate about social issues, but seem to only scream and yell to make their voice heard. By utilizing the marketing framework to "sell" their ideas, these people can build off the success of hundreds of years and billions of dollars of business experience developing marketing plans. I highly recommend this book as an excellent guide. Great contribution by leading authors This book provides a wide range of examples of potential solutions
to poverty challenges where social marketing concepts and tools can be
applied -- and then shows how that can actually happen. Further, it is a
thorough review of all the basic approaches to doing social marketing well
-- written with an absence of academic jargon.
Finally, it is just the kind of book one would want to give to leaders in
the government, nonprofit and private sectors who don't know much about
social marketing or how it might be great way to improve the effectiveness
of what they do. Changing behavior, the most difficult job in the world Kotler and Lee have written a book that deserves to be read by every aid organization in the world. Money alone will not solve the poverty problem. What's needed are changes in behavior. And how best to accomplish this objective: use the tools of marketing. That's not an easy message to bring to the powers-that-be, most of whom consider marketing to be simplistic and ineffectual. Not true and this book is a powerful first step in what is going to be a long and difficult sell. More than just a book I work on the board of a poverty fighting organization and this is the down to earth set of tools I have been looking for. No long discussions about the immensity of the poverty problem-but lots of guidance and case examples of what really works. Access is given to downloadable forms and checklists the book lives up to the sub-title A Toolkit. Perhaps most valuable is the way in which the authors demonstrate that the public, private, and nonprofit sectors can work together to do more, and one organization doesn't have to bear the entire burden. |  |
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