Our social nature is the basis for marketing public and social goods. How effective we are in social interactions directly influences the success of our marketing and ultimately whether we succeed in our social mission. Here’s the research-proven way to win more cooperation:
Markets, and marketing, help bring consumers and producers together. In this sense, markets and marketing can be said to aggregate the demands of consumers into a focused or structured group, so that producers can easily serve them. Does this same mechanism apply to public and social goods that we, as citizens, want to consume? And...Continue reading
I like how Paul Polak and Mal Warwick start The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers focused on their target customer, the global poor who live on less than $2 per day. This is a massive customer segment: 2.7 billion people.
So far, my posts have been somewhat critical of The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers, by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick, and I can think of at least a couple more critical points. However, I really appreciate their approach to marketing and design.
In The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers, authors Paul Polak and Mal Warwick believe that, unlike government and philanthropy, business is uniquely capable of solving poverty. Still, they allow room for others to pitch in.
One clear message from Elinor Ostrom‘s Governing the Commons is that regulations–rules–matter for the sustainability and fair use of community resources. Ostrom studied or surveyed thousands of systems from around that world that had sustainably managed community resources over long periods of time, decades, even centuries.
In this blog I’ve been relating marketing and its classic 4 Ps–product, price, placement, and promotion–to the public goods, services, and interactions that build and strengthen our communities. Reading Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom reminded me of the other 4 Ps of marketing.
In a previous post, I touched on an archaeological dig in British Columbia, Canada, that is chronicled in a series of articles in the Pacific Standard magazine. The dig concerned how a tribe of hunter-gatherers transitioned to a settled life based on fishing a salmon-rich river.
One great thing that Elinor Ostrom did in her book Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action was to lay out design principles for long-enduring institutions that manage community pooled resources (CPR) and avoid the “tragedy of the commons“. (CPRs can be many things. Ostrom’s draws her main examples from forestry, fisheries,...Continue reading
I just finished reading Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action, by Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. She was the first woman to win the Economics prize. I sense I’m going to rave about her book in several blog posts. You might want to surrender now...Continue reading