HBS Working Knowledge has an interesting article on this topic. Read on:
You as a marketer want people who are living in poverty to take better care of their health. So, given your profession, what do you do? You can persuade them—through public service announcements, colorful leaflets, and on-the-ground advocacy—to go get a free eye exam or a blood pressure check-up. Easy. Your basic principles of sales and promotion will carry the day.
If your charge is minimizing smoking or drug use, well, your job becomes rather more complicated. Still, your experience in sales and promotion may give you some insights, à la the "Just Say No" campaign.
But let's say your goals are a good deal more ambitious. You care about benefiting society as a whole. You want to help people stuck in grinding poverty. You want to know what villagers think about a dam proposal for their valley. Or that loan to spur agriculture. Or the supermarket going up in the inner city. What can a marketing background say to you when your goal is not to sell Coca-Cola, but to offer a better existence to people on the edge?
Rangan, head of the HBS faculty marketing unit, has been wrestling with the limits of social marketing for a decade. McCaffrey was so impressed by a talk Rangan gave several years ago on "marketing to the poorest customers" that he campaigned to work alongside him.
Read on