Social Marketing and Cause Marketing

Rangan is studying the role of marketing in influencing social change by focusing on the adoption of social products and ideas such as family planning, economic development, drug abuse prevention, health care, and recycling. Rangan is attempting to determine how social change might occur in some of the more challenging social marketing contexts, in which the benefit resides largely at the societal level and not at the immediate level of the the individual. As a corollary to this research he is also examining the role of commercial organizations that take on the role of advocating a social cause as part of their brand advocacy.