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For an example of how marketing can be used by non-profits for social good read this: "All advertising strives to sell happiness, implying that buying certain goods or services will make you feel better than you did before. Pitching happiness itself, striving to communicate the gravity of the concept and its importance in our daily lives, is a different matter entirely-and that's the metaphorical mission of Hill Holliday's pro-bono "Happier Boston" push for suicide-prevention group Samaritans Inc. In addition to a Web site and PSAs, the campaign is taking its message to the streets via "social experiments." These include cheering "fans" at railroad platforms to greet commuters and wish them a great day; surprise skyscraper elevator sing-alongs; and handing out citrus fruits emblazoned with the message, "Orange you happy?"

The findings of "Adaptation Amidst Prosperity and Adversity" include: As incomes rise, so do expectations, reducing the happiness that the increased prosperity may have brought about. This "paradox of unhappy growth" is present in a broad range of countries, both developed and developing. Consequently, "rising incomes do not translate into ever-increasing levels of happiness." When incomes fall or remain low, individuals in many societies are able to successfully adjust their expectations. "Remarkably adverse circumstances, such as high levels of crime and corruption or very poor standards of health, do not seem to result in equivalently low levels of happiness." Life difficulties can be overcome by increases in income, but the amounts required are substantial. The average individual in the United States or the United Kingdom would need to produce an estimated $60,000 in income to overcome the unhappiness resulting from job loss, and $100,000 to overcome divorce. While the correlations between stated satisfaction with different life aspects were all positive with per capita gross domestic product (GDP), but were all negative with economic growth. For example, life satisfaction levels had a 0.788 correlation with GDP but a -0.082 correlation with economic growth. All measures of social connections - both the support that they get from others and the support that they give to others - were significantly and positively correlated with life satisfaction across the countries.

It turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty. The catch is that additional income doesn't buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard.

"At this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, we asked a group of professors, psychologists, and journalists how people's definitions of happiness could be evolving. "I do think there's been a rise in materialistic sorts of values," says Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. "Those tend to be hard to reconcile with happiness." Other panelists include Tim Kasser, Susan Greenfield, Paul Bloom, and Suleika Jaouad. "

"At least half of Happy Meals listed on menus in the United States will not exceed 600 calories and will have other other dietary restrictions, like limits on saturated fat and sodium percentages. In order to accomplish that, McDonald's is taking cheeseburgers off the Happy Meal menu (they are still available upon request), decreasing the amount of fries that come with the six-piece Chicken McNuggets meal, cutting the amount of added sugar in chocolate milk and adding bottled water onto the children's menu, according to the release."

"A precipitous drop in the happiness, self-esteem and life satisfaction of American teens came as their ownership of smartphones rocketed from zero to 73% and they devoted an increasing share of their time online. Coincidence? New research suggests it is not. In a study published Monday in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia used data on mood and media culled from roughly 1.1 million U.S. teens to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among U.S. teens suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the next four years."

"The idea that you can't buy happiness has been exposed as a myth, over and over. Richer countries are happier than poor countries. Richer people within richer countries are happier, too. The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it. So what should you do with it? Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences"

Facebook happiness index graphs from 2008 and 2009

"If you're not already logging and quantifying your moods, don't worry. Apple declared self-care apps the top app trend of 2018, and they've been growing in number by the month. There are thousands available to guide you along your happiness journey. And while it's hard to come out against a pro-snacking, nap-positive app genre, the boom in self-care and digital wellness shouldn't automatically be a cause for celebration. It's a reason for pause  - and maybe even cause for concern, given the questionable quality of some of them. "

"While we can all agree that desperate poverty is hideous, there is a broadly held view that after a certain level of income (around $75,000, say), more money doesn't buy more well-being. But it's just not so. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been arguing for years that, yes, richer families tend to be happier, and no, there is not an automatic cut-off point. In other words: Mo money, fewer problems. "

TED talks on happiness

"Things can make people happier than experiences, a study finds, depending on the kind of happiness being measured"

"Psychologist Tim Kasser discusses how America's culture of consumerism undermines our well-being. When people buy into the ever-present marketing messages that "the good life" is "the goods life," they not only use up Earth's limited resources, but they are less happy and less inclined toward helping others. The animation both lays out the problems of excess materialism and points toward solutions that promise a healthier, more just, and more sustainable life."

"The commercials are being touted as brilliant marketing. They associate sugary drinks with "happiness, fulfillment, and having fun," says Nancy Huehnergarth at The Huffington Post. But they don't really attempt to address obesity, says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The soda industry is under siege, and for good reason," he says, and clearly, Coke is trying to control its image."

"Compared with their grandparents, today's young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and much greater risk of depression and assorted social pathology," notes Hope College psychologist David G. Myers, PhD, author of the article, which appeared in the American Psychologist (Vol. 55, No. 1). "Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being." These findings emerge at a time when the consumer culture has reached a fever pitch, comments Myers, also the author of "The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty" (Yale University Press, 2000).

"Coca-Cola's "It's Beautiful" ad, that aired during Sunday night's Super Bowl, sought to portray ethnic diversity in the U.S. by featuring "America the Beautiful" sung in several languages. The many different kinds of people in the ad - Hispanics, cowboys, Muslims, Jews and Asians - were all implicitly united by their identity as "American." But not everyone was happy with Coke's celebration of diversity in the country. After the ad was aired, Twitter lit up with commentary  under various hashtags (such as #SpeakAmerican) critical of the company. Some commenters found it disrespectful to sing "America the Beautiful" in any language other than English, while others said immigrants need to learn English to live in the United States."

"When Marsha Richins started researching materialism in the early 1990s, it was a subject that had mostly been left to philosophers and religious thinkers. One focus of Richins's research has been how that pursuit begins in childhood, and in particular accelerates in middle school. That's the time when kids, on average, give the most materialistic responses to the question of what makes them happy. In a paper published last year, Richins described how the social dynamics of middle school can lead children to place more importance on owning and having things. (Movies, TV, the internet, media, advertising, and parents' own habits, of course, can have similar effects.)"

"We define digital nutrition as two distinct but complementary behaviors. The first is the healthful consumption of digital assets, or any positive, purposeful content designed to alleviate emotional distress or maximize human potential, health, and happiness. The second behavior is smarter decision-making, aided by greater transparency around the composition and behavioral consequences of specific types of digital content. People already use music, film, TV, video games, and various digital devices to relax and escape or to avoid painful and unpleasant feelings or decisions. But in this increasingly wireless world, we need a more realistic strategy. Digital material can-and, in our view, should-be leveraged for preventative purposes (to maintain mood and avoid regular descents into depression), for palliative purposes (to ease acute anxiety and other unpleasant feelings), and for regulatory purposes (to track volume of personal exposure to digital asset types known to produce negative outcomes)."

"There's a popular suspicion, for example, that Tinder and other dating apps might make people pickier or more reluctant to settle on a single monogamous partner, a theory that the comedian Aziz Ansari spends a lot of time on in his 2015 book, Modern Romance, written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg. Eli Finkel, however, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, rejects that notion. "Very smart people have expressed concern that having such easy access makes us commitment-phobic," he says, "but I'm not actually that worried about it." Research has shown that people who find a partner they're really into quickly become less interested in alternatives. Finkel believes that dating apps haven't changed happy relationships much-but he does think they've lowered the threshold of when to leave an unhappy one. In the past, there was a step in which you'd have to go to the trouble of "getting dolled up and going to a bar," Finkel says, and you'd have to look at yourself and say, "What am I doing right now? I'm going out to meet a guy. I'm going out to meet a girl," even though you were in a relationship already. Now, he says, "you can just tinker around, just for a sort of a goof; swipe a little just 'cause it's fun and playful. And then it's like, oh-[suddenly] you're on a date." The other subtle ways in which people believe dating is different now that Tinder is a thing are, quite frankly, innumerable. Some believe that dating apps' visual-heavy format encourages people to choose their partners more superficially (and with racial or sexual stereotypes in mind); others argue that humans choose their partners with physical attraction in mind even without the help of Tinder. There are equally compelling arguments that dating apps have made dating both more awkward and less awkward by allowing matches to get to know each other remotely before they ever meet face-to-faceâ€

"Do people really live the lives they portray on Facebook? The answer is-partially... because most people share selectively.  For example, have you ever posted something on Facebook then checked back later to see how many people "liked" your post? If you have, don´t worry, you are in good company. For most people, Facebook sharing is not selfish, it is social. That is why we call it social media."