Marketing for Social Innovation: How Brands Create Change, from Cause Marketing to Brand Activism, ESG, and the Age of AI

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The most powerful tool for changing human behavior ever invented can sell sugar water—or it can help end a slave trade, reforest a nation, and put a vaccine within a newborn's reach. The difference is a choice. This book is about that choice.From Josiah Wedgwood's anti-slavery medallion in the 1780s to Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket," from Jackie Robinson's debut to Google's flood-forecasting AI, Marketing for Social Innovation tells the 250-year story of marketing used as a force for good—and treats it with the same rigor the best marketers bring to selling anything else.Across twenty-nine episodes in six chapters, it moves from the origins of social-innovation marketing through cause marketing, brand activism, certification and shared value, impact measurement and reputation, and on to the frontier of open innovation and AI. Each episode is a real case, dissected for the mechanism beneath it:Dove's Real Beauty and the architecture of trustTOMS, (RED), and the promise—and limits—of "buy one, give one"Patagonia, Nike, and Bud Light: when brand activism builds a fortune, and when it burns one downYuhan-Kimberly's Keep Korea Green and Korea's don-jjul "reward-the-good" movementGrameen, Interface, and the hard business case for a better worldIt does not flinch from the failures—because the failures teach more than the wins. And it is written from a vantage point most books on this subject ignore: one that sets Asian cases beside Western ones, and asks what each can learn from the other.Underneath every chapter runs a single idea you will not be able to un-see: the most durable strategies are the ones where the social outcome and the commercial outcome are the same outcome. Purpose that is bolted on gets punished. Purpose that is built in compounds.Who this book is for:Students meeting marketing for the first time—and wanting a reason to care about itWorking marketers looking for the deeper "why" behind the workNonprofit and social-enterprise leaders who need a sharper language for what they doESG, sustainability, and CSR professionals connecting strategy to storyEvery chapter closes with a "For your organization" diagnostic, and the book includes a full glossary and references. No marketing background required—only an interest in the question it begins with: what is this powerful discipline actually for? Read more