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Attending the American Marketing Association's Summer Marketing Educators' Conference this past Sunday in Chicago, it was refreshing to see a marketing session on the schedule with this name: "Marketing Strategies for Helping the Poor Get Up and Out of Poverty." Not that there's anything wrong with sessions about social media, marketing in the recession and the like -- those are essential -- but it is important to recognize how mighty marketing can be beyond aiding the pivotal bottom line.

To session presenters Philip Kotler, Nancy Lee, Bill Smith and Alan Andreasen, the ultimate bottom line is that a majority of the world's population is suffering from great poverty. Given marketing's power of persuasion, there are ways that marketing can be used to decrease poverty rates, death from diseases and other societal difficulties, by marketing to the afflicted and those with the means to help.

Smith, senior fellow of innovations management for Washington-based global development nonprofit AED, shared insights from a recent study. Findings showed that growth in GDP doesn't impact life expectancy, but education sector aid and investment in the health sector does, while health sector aid and education sector aid impact primary school enrollment. His conclusion: there's a need to balance investment in health, education and confidence, and tailor marketing to these arenas.

In his presentation, Andreasen, professor of marketing at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, stressed the importance of marketing upstream in order to change public policies. But the wrong way market is to strictly tell potential partners that the world will be a better place, he said. Instead, you have to show what's in it for them. He drew a strong analogy connected to McDonald's marketing; the company doesn't encourage people to buy hamburgers because its stockholders will make a lot of money, but to eat hamburgers because they taste good.

Lee, president of consulting firm Social Marketing Services Inc. in Seattle, and co-author with Kotler of the new book Up and Out of Poverty: The Social Marketing Solution, discussed five principals to consider as a means to influence positive financial contributions to get people out of poverty: segment and prioritize markets; focus on desired behaviors, identify the barriers to benefits; develop target strategies, while bearing in mind product, price, place and promotion; and target public, private and the nonprofit sectors.

One of the session's best illustrated examples, which tied into a need for segmentation, involves condom advocacy in Thailand. Headed by ex-Thai senator Mechai Viravaidya, dubbed "The Condom King," the strategy has targeted married couples and young adults, and eliminated the stigma associated with condoms. Birth control pills have been rebranded "family welfare vitamins" and are sprinkled with holy water by Buddhist monks. Teenagers engage in condom blowing contests in school. Bank tellers pass out condoms, and there's even 12 Cabbages and Condoms restaurants in the country, where free condoms are distributed to guests. This may sound strange, but it delivered results: AIDS infection has dropped from 140,000 in 1991 to 20,000 in 2003, says Lee, and the average number of children in a family has been reduced from seven in 1974 to 1.2 in 2005.