Poverty represents something of a meta-issue for the social marketing community. So many of the issues that we tackle through our work can be reduce to consequences of poverty. Indeed, the all-pervasive nature of the problem and its nexus of consequences, renders most of our projects provisional, symptomatic treatments of a problem in lieu of a serious answer to the meta-problem of poverty. (See this for Mohammed Yunus on poverty and peace for a demonstration of the malign ‘reach’ of the poverty problem).

In a keynote address at the World Social Marketing Conference, Philip Kotler outlined some initial parameters in which this answer could be formulated and delivered. Read more