Put on your marketing hat, then set these recent announcements side-by-side: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 10.5 percent of all US households experienced food insecurity in 2019. With the pandemic recession, nearly 1 in 4 US households have experienced food insecurity this year. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, 30-40 percent of the...
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Distribution is important enough to the social good that the United Nations World Food Programme has won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. WFP provides food aid distribution and other services for 100 million people across 88 countries every day. They often work inside war zones and epidemics and famines....
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During the coronavirus pandemic, public officials have promoted social distancing and strongly encouraged us to stay home. But aside from promoting this behavior through traditional and social media, what else could these officials have done to increase the likelihood of compliance? Distributing coronavirus supplies could also help, and South Korea has been held up...
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This blog is all about marketing social goods, including public health. The United States, and the rest of the world, are in the middle of a public health crisis with the coronavirus pandemic. Although, as I write this, the pandemic will last at least several more weeks, there are some coronavirus marketing lessons we...
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Self-help gurus and billionaires and other blowhards think people are poor because they have a poverty mentality....
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In Silicon Valley, companies discuss and worry about their “technical debt.” That’s the friction caused by the accumulation of bad design choices, expedient compromises, avoided decisions, and postponed work....
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When I say in this blog that we are social creatures, I’m being quite literal. Our brains are physically wired to be social. Each one of us has an interpersonal neurobiology that responds to the world around us....
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The effectiveness of social goods often comes down to distribution. Can you put social goods in the hand of the people who need and want them? This is a huge challenge in the informal settlements in the world’s urban areas. A team of university researchers, government agencies, and software companies are showing how AI...
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As shown in my previous post on fairness featuring video about Capuchin monkeys who were paid unequally, fairness is innate. But what is the evolutionary benefit of fairness? Brian Hayden, professor emeritus of archaeology at Simon Frazer University in British Columbia, Canada, has an interesting theory. It revolves around scarcity and the distribution of...
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I visited Estonia in the mid-1990s. Back then, I said it would be fascinating to return in 20 years and see what changed....
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