The Social Marketplace is a tool designed for the PCIA community. The Social Marketplace is a collection of best practices, tools, case studies, and resources around the marketing of cookstoves and other social goods to poor consumers. While the geographies, organizations and target audiences may differ, there are lessons and insights that can be shared between all practitioners looking to sell cookstoves. We make it easy to share best practices around social marketing to enable faster, more efficient scaling of social goods and services such as fuel-efficient cookstoves.
Contact Information
Our Focus
The results of strategic and sophisticated marketing campaigns for cookstoves are well documented. More people access clean, healthy cooking technologies. However, the tools to operate such campaigns have not been adopted in all places around the world. The project will achieve results by raising awareness of better marketing techniques, and providing the tools to implement these techniques. The potential impact of the project is huge - building a reliable distribution channel, determining the appropriate price, finding the relevant promotional messaging and medium, and designing the product well are all major obstacles in the success of cookstove projects. Without these elements, it is nearly impossible to scale the sale and distribution of cookstoves. These elements are primary obstacles for many cookstove projects. We currently feature seven case studies from for-profits and non-profits, a detailed marketing toolkit covering the 4 P's (product, price, place, and promotions), and a resource center the includes best-in-class examples of marketing collateral from PSI, Living Goods, Paradigm Project, and others.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
Social and cultural barriers are a huge part of our focus at the Social Marketplace. Despite the best of intentions, we have not yet achieved a "tipping point" for clean cookstoves adoption. Part of the genesis for our organization and this resource was the realization that if we don't address some of these barriers and highlight past failures, we may end up repeating the same mistakes with different products in different locations with different focus groups. Cataloging and sharing those stories may help others to avoid these mistakes. As an example, check out our page on barriers to adoption (http://thesocialmarketplace.org/stories/barriers-to-adoption/) or the EarthSpark International case study (http://thesocialmarketplace.org/casestudy/earthspark/).
We would like to turn the Social Marketplace into a hub for people sharing best practices, case studies, and field resources around social marketing. By incorporating content from all over the world, translated into multiple languages, we can create a community where people can share their candid thoughts on what works and what doesn't in a certain area, and the building blocks for those new in the game. To tackle indoor air pollution at a large scale, it's important for us to work together and disseminate key learnings. We currently cross-publish our content with HEDON (http://hedon.info/SocialMarketplace+?bl=y) and are also in discussions with the UN Foundation and GACC for further content distribution.
We are technology and brand/product agnostic. The Social Marketplace is designed for organizations designing, manufacturing, selling, and/or distributing social goods such as cookstoves and water filters. The majority of examples and stories focus on the challenges unique to clean cookstoves, whether they are charcoal or biomass burning.
From our association with Impact Carbon, we are keenly interested in robust monitoring and evaluation tools. However, the focus of the Social Marketplace is on the upstream elements before monitoring takes place -- how to design a product that resonates with the end user and seamlessly integrates into her lifestyle, how to develop novel retail and pricing contracts to enable affordability for those with fluctuating incomes, and so on. The Social Marketplace is interested in monitoring as it relates to marketing-related efforts (campaign effectiveness, uptake after a design change, etc).
Relevant Publications or Studies
All material is publicly available at www.thesocialmarketplace.org
Our Contribution to the Partnership
As a member of the Partnership, we would like to help other organizations optimize their cookstove marketing efforts. We want to continue to share more stories, case studies, and examples of best-in-class resources to help ensure up-to-date and relevant content for our community. We also offer consulting services for organizations interested in a more personalized experience.
