Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution [Hardcover]

Philip Kotler (Author), Nancy R. Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0137141009 | ISBN-13: 978-0137141005 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Philip Kotler is S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Hailed as the “foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing,” he is author of Marketing Management, the field’s definitive textbook (now in its 13th edition).

 

Kotler’s books also include Principles of Marketing, Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations, Marketing Places, Kotler on Marketing, Marketing Insights A to Z, Lateral Marketing, Social Marketing, Museum Strategies and Marketing, Standing Room Only, and Corporate Social Responsibility. His research encompasses social marketing, innovation, consumer marketing, business marketing, services marketing, distribution, and e-marketing. He has consulted with companies including IBM, Bank of America, Merck, GE, and Honeywell.

 

Nancy R. Lee, President of Social Marketing Services, Inc., has more than 25 years of practical marketing experience in private, nonprofit, and public sectors. An adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington and Seattle University, she teaches Marketing in the Public Sector, Social Marketing, and Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations. 

 

Lee has coauthored four books with Philip Kotler, including Social Marketing: Improving the Quality of Life, Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause, and Marketing in the Public Sector: A Roadmap for Improved Performance.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Many books have been written about the scourge of poverty. They offer different theories on poverty and different solutions. Some outline macro solutions, and others deal with micro solutions. Our book takes a very different look at the problem and offers a different model for helping the poor escape from poverty. We examine the power of “social marketing methodology” to abate the suffering of the poor. This preface describes the major approaches to fighting poverty and how our approach adds to the set of tools for helping the poor achieve a better life.

Of all the problems facing mankind—disease, hard drugs, crime, corruption, armed conflict, global warming, nuclear risks, environmental sustainability—poverty is among the most persistent and shameful. Furthermore, poverty contributes greatly to the other problems. The poor suffer more from disease, and their hopeless condition leads some of the poor into lives of crime, hard drugs, and armed conflict. This means that the cost of poverty far exceeds the cost that the poor themselves bear. Poverty pours its poison on the rest of mankind.

Until the nineteenth century, the poor received little attention. Poverty was seen as inevitable. Governments and do-gooders could do little about it. The Industrial Revolution exacerbated the problem by attracting poor rural peasants to the cities in search of work. This led to the establishment of shantytowns and poorhouses. The plight of the poor became more visible. Caring researchers such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the U.K. started to count the poor and write about their plight. Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist, vividly dramatized the conditions and exploitation of the poor.

The concept of creating antipoverty programs began in the nineteenth century and continues today. One sixth of the world’s population earns less than $1 a day. Another 2 billion of the world’s 6 billion people earn less than $2 a day. In the year 2000, the United Nations outlined its multilateral plan for reducing world poverty. The United Nations formulated the Millennium Development Goals (MDG)—eight goals with eighteen accompanying targets, designed to significantly reduce poverty levels by 2015. Target 1 was to cut in half between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. The goal is ambitious and is not likely to be achieved, given the tumultuous new circumstances of rising food and energy costs and continued armed conflict in the world.

Experts have put forth different theories of the causes of the problem and therefore have advocated different measures to cure the problem. We can distinguish between experts who see poverty as having a major basic cause and those who see many causal factors at work.

The simplest theory is that the poor have brought the condition on themselves. The assertion is that many are shiftless, lazy, and uneducated and prefer to live on handouts rather than exerting effort to lift themselves out of poverty. The implied solution from this view is to either find a way to change their attitude and behavior or leave them in their penurious state. Granted, some of the poor are responsible for their condition. However, there is evidence that most of the poor would be ready and willing to escape their penurious conditions if they could find employment and have a decent place to live.

Another simplistic theory is that poverty is the result of the poor having too many children. Each new child makes a poor family poorer. The argument goes further to say that the Earth has a limited population “carrying capacity” for resources and food to permit a decent standard of living for six billion people (let alone the 9 billion people projected by 2020). Therefore, poverty continues to be a problem because of overpopulation. This is a variation on Thomas Malthus’ proposition that the rate of population growth will exceed the rate of growth of food supply, resulting in starvation, war, and the continuation of poverty.¹ The major modern version of this view is found in the book The Limits to Growth.² Here the solution follows that much poverty would abate if poor families would limit the number of their offspring voluntarily or by edict. China represents the latter in restricting families to only one child. Certainly this has been one of the major contributors to China’s impressive reduction in the number of families living in poverty.

Another singular theory is that poverty persists because the poor don’t own any fungible property on which they could borrow money. They lack tradeable assets. This theory has been propounded by the highly respected though controversial Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto in his book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.³ De Soto argues that the real source of wealth is real property—that is, well-defined and socially accepted property rights. Property is an asset that can be used to get or make a loan or mortgage, or obtain insurance or own stock, and other things that make capitalism so effective in producing economic growth and prosperity. But de Soto says this doesn’t work in poor communities and countries because the institutions don’t recognize the assets of the poor. The poor have plenty of assets (land, homes, businesses), but they typically lie in the extralegal, informal realm. The legal system has not adapted to this reality. The costs of making these assets legal (obtaining proper title to a house, registering a business) are so prohibitive in terms of time and money that the assets end up being “dead capital.” The poor cannot use their assets to achieve any of the normal capitalist tools to achieve upward mobility. Because these assets are not recognized, they create an extralegal style of living within their informal social circles. For de Soto, the singular solution is to push the legal system to allow the monetization of these assets so that the dead capital becomes alive.

Besides these grand singular theories, the majority of experts recognize poverty as resulting from many interrelated causes, all of which must be addressed in an integrated fashion. Consider Paul Collier’s views in his book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.⁴ According to Collier, the billion people at the bottom live in “trapped countries.” He identifies four elements that cause countries to become trapped:

• Civil war. Nearly three-quarters of the bottom billion have been through or are currently experiencing civil war. Civil wars usually occur where there are large numbers of unemployed and uneducated young men and ethnic imbalances.
• Natural resources curse. Almost 30% of these countries rely on exporting some raw materials, such as oil or minerals. Countries with large amounts of natural resources tend not to develop the skill sets of their people, and they tend not to hold democratic elections. Corrupt governments and impoverished and violent masses often result.
• Landlocked countries. About 30% of the countries with desperate poor are landlocked or surrounded by bad neighbors. This leaves them economically disadvantaged.
• Bad governance. About 75% of the countries suffer from bad governance or autocratic leaders who exploit their people.

Each condition requires a different type of solution. Collier favors legitimate military interventions in areas being torn apart by civil war. Countries with large amounts of natural resources should develop skills that raise the value of their exports and should not simply export raw materials at world market prices. Landlocked countries must learn to work with neighboring port-based countries to build roads that will give them access to ports. Bad governance is the hardest problem to solve. Robert Mugabe ran Zimbabwe into the ground, and the rest of the world stood helplessly by.

Collier’s chief recommendation to fight poverty is to “narrow the target and broaden the instruments.” Narrowing the target means focusing on the one billion of the world’s people (70% of whom are in Africa) who are in countries that are failing. Broadening the instruments means shifting focus from aid to an array of policy instruments: better delivery of aid, occasional military intervention, international charters, and smarter trade policy.

What about foreign aid as a partial solution to the problems of the poor? Two experts have sharply different views of the value of foreign aid. Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, wants the West to be more generous and to give substantially more foreign aid to poor countries.⁵ On the other hand, William Easterly, in The White Man’s Burden, advances strong arguments against foreign aid.⁶ He describes Jeffrey Sachs as one of those big “top-down planners” who is never embarrassed about the many failures of foreign aid. Some estimate that as little as 15% of foreign aid reaches the deserving poor as a result of high administrative expenses and corruption. Foreign-aid relief agencies’ tendency to do “top-down planning” fails to provide information on variations in local needs for medicines and foods. Foreign...

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall; 1 edition (June 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137141009
• ISBN-13: 978-0137141005
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #739,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Kotler is the S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. He has been honored as one of the world's leading marketing thinkers. He received his M.A. degree in economics (1953) from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. degree in economics (1956) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and has received honorary degrees from twelve foreign universities. He is the author of over 40 books and over one hundred articles. He has been a consultant to IBM, General Electric, Sony, AT&T, Bank of America, Merck, Motorola, Ford, and others. The Financial Times included him in its list of the top 10 business thinkers. They cited his Marketing Management as one of the 50 best business books of all times.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than just a book, June 30, 2009

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Tony Leisner - See all my reviews

This review is from: Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Using marketing methods to alleviate poverty, September 13, 2010

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Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution (Hardcover)

Sound marketing can push products and services through sales channels. But can donors successfully apply the same marketing techniques to poverty reduction programs? That's the bold recommendation of authors Philip Kotler and Nancy R. Lee. They build a solid case, linking social marketing strategy with actual case studies worldwide. As the authors note, developed nations spent an estimated $23 trillion on foreign aid packages over the past five decades, but their money has done little to reduce poverty. The missing factor is a social marketing strategy that changes local behaviors and helps people work their way out of poverty. While this is a noble goal, Kotler and Lee's argument reads like a dry textbook, with too many lists and bullet points. Still, getAbstract found it to be an instructive guide for NGOs, governments and social activists who seek advanced strategies to bolster their poverty reduction programs.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great overview of applying marketing concepts to solving social problems, October 14, 2009

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Jason Stokes (St. Louis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution (Hardcover)

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.