This originally appeared on the Huffington Post on December 15, 2015.
From 1992 to 2001, I did some of the most important – and
fun – work of my life: I managed social marketing programs for the nonprofit PSI in Zambia, Bangladesh and Paraguay. Social
marketing is a technique that uses the tools of social marketing to achieve a
social outcome – in PSI’s case, that outcome is improved health. The programs I
worked on were HIV prevention, family planning and child health but social
marketing can also be applied to other disciplines as well.
I owe that singular experience to Phil Harvey, who founded
PSI in 1970 to promote family planning through the social
marketing mechanism. In 1989, he founded DKT International, another social
marketing organization more tightly focused on reproductive health mainly in
very large countries (in order to have cost-effective impact at greater scale).
Harvey has also served, and continues to serve, for many years on the board of
directors of Marie Stopes International,
another organization that uses social marketing.
Phil Harvey is introduced as “a visionary, pioneer and titan
in the world of social marketing” in this
new video interview. Harvey describes his early work in India, the roots of
social marketing, his creation of two social marketing organizations, his legal
battle with the State of New York over reproductive health issues (that went
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court) and the impact of social marketing.
