Business and Economics: The Transformative Potential of Marketing to Fight Child Poverty

The purpose of this chapter is primarily to answer the following question: How can marketing as a discipline contribute to the fight against child poverty? In pursuit of this answer, the chapter looks to recent academic research conducted under the banners of transformative consumer research (TCR) and transformative service research (TSR)–bodies of work that explicitly consider individuals’ well-being outcomes and the transformative impact that marketing can have on people’s lives. Subsequently drawing from this accumulation of research, the chapter applies a consumer-centric framework from the TSR literature to evaluate the current provision of services to people living in poverty–specifically to those services impacting children’s quality of life. The chapter concludes with practical, market-based solutions to addressing child poverty, accompanied by real-world examples supporting the effectiveness of such actions.