Over 50 years ago, the psychologist G. D. Wiebe asked the question ‘Can brotherhood be sold like soap?' In his paper, ‘Merchandising Commodities and Citizenship on Television', Wiebe proposed that organizations which successfully ‘sell' intangible social objects-such as goodwill, respect for the environment or community development-would be more successful if they sold their social objects the way marketers sell sports cars or mouth wash. To test this notion, Wiebe developed a set of five criteria (Table 1) and used them to evaluate how social campaigns compared to commercial marketing practices. After evaluating four social campaigns by his five criteria, Wiebe concluded that the more social campaigns resembled commercial marketing practices, the better their chance of success.