Philip Kao

  • Appleseed

  • Funded with support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

  • 2019 Global Fellow

Philip Kao
  • Appleseed

  • Funded with support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

  • 2019 Global Fellow

bold idea

Enhance the ability of international development organizations around the world to enact change by showing them how to use behavioral marketing to make their solutions stick in the communities they serve.

organization overview

Appleseed demystifies behavioral marketing for change-makers around the world. Millions suffer when organizations struggle to help people form new habits, like drinking from a new water source, sleeping under a mosquito net, planting an unfamiliar crop, or eating something new. Appleseed conducts in-country behavior change audits and tailored coaching, helping change-makers to understand people’s motivations, biases, and barriers to change, and to design programs and communications that drive action across populations. This reduces cost-per-impact and enables organizations to achieve their missions. Appleseed envisions a day when all international development organizations will methodically market for impact, like how businesses today market for profit.

Personal Bio

Philip Kao, co-founder and executive director of Appleseed, is a practitioner of behavioral marketing. When Philip left the corporate world to volunteer overseas in 2010, he was a UCLA engineer and Accenture tech consultant who thought that building water kiosks and distributing water filters would help villagers living without clean water. When his projects failed to consider and address hidden biases and social challenges, they failed to sustainably change behavior and make impact. He experienced bitter disappointment alongside all the people he worked with: NGO teams, Peace Corps volunteers, social entrepreneurs, and community leaders. Determined to find a fix, Philip rebooted his career with the behavioral marketing firm SGA. There, he led teams and ran campaigns on behalf of government agencies like the City of Los Angeles and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, applying social psychology and behavioral science to change population-wide environmental habits in cities and counties across California. In 2015, Philip founded Appleseed to adapt a practical and affordable behavioral marketing approach for the development sector. With Appleseed, he has worked alongside local organizations serving poor communities in Ecuador, China, Taiwan, the United States, Guatemala, Kenya, India, and Senegal. Philip is a 2019 Echoing Green Fellow.