Voice and advocacy

Of the nearly six billion inhabitants of this planet, nearly three billion may be classified as poor. Many who live on the edges of poverty do not experience markets and market exchanges, which are the very backbone of much of marketing practice and scholarship as we know it today. This paper makes the argument that social marketing has a role to play here on behalf of poor customers through interest representation and customer advocacy. A stakeholder model of value creation and resource allocation is presented as an example of how marketing's expertise could contribute to more effective and equitable ways to alleviate poverty. This is a far more pro-active role in social change than what the marketing discipline has been hitherto accustomed to. A different kind of social marketing paradigm is proposed, one aimed at changing lives rather than influencing customer choices. The paper proposes that marketing follow a model of social activism, which can mediate the interests of downstream customers and upstream funders via the heuristic of voice and advocacy. Marketing professionals to practitioners are urged to create a representative voice for poor customers in policy deliberation, program design, and field execution.