It’s All About the Customer:
Commercial and Social Marketing Perspectives on the
Customer-Driven Organizations and Social Change Programs

With increasing frequency, commercial and social marketers are concerned with making organizations and social change programs “customer focused” or “marketing driven”:

• What do these terms really mean today?
• What are the characteristics of such organizations and programs – what do they do differently than others?
• How can government, non-profit, private and other social sector organizations incorporate these ideas to better achieve their missions and accomplish programmatic results?
• Does terminology matter?  Are we focusing on customers, consumers, beneficiaries, citizens, or clients?

The 11th Annual Innovations in Social Marketing Conference will explore these and other questions with speakers and panelists who will challenge us to use a new, customer-centered way of thinking to enhance our program planning and implementation.

Sessions will cover:

• What commercial marketing colleagues have learned about being customer-focused.
• The role of innovation in designing more impactful programs, reaching customers, and maintaining connections with them.
• Cutting edge work in “human-centered” design.  How technology innovations is changing the ways we reach the customer.
• How socially oriented organizations or programs reinvented or adapted themselves through customer-centered strategies.

Join us in exploring these aspects of customer-centered social marketing at the 11th Innovations in Social Marketing Conference, where we will take a break from our busy schedules and carve out time to think about these issues.  Invitees include major foundations, government agencies, non-profits, academics, and implementing organizations.  Panels and participant roundtables will consist of commercial and social marketing experts, both practitioners and academics.  Our invitation only attendance of up to 125 participants is limited to ensure senior-level input, quality interaction, and an extensive exchange of ideas.