C.K. Prahalad News & Articles
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Selling to the Poor (By Allen L. Hammond, C.K. Prahalad)Foreign Policy, May/June 2004 Searching for new customerseager to buy your products? Forget Tokyo’s schoolgirls and Milan’sfashionistas. Instead, try the world’s 4 billion poor people, the largestuntapped consumer market on Earth. To reach them, CEOs must shed old conceptsof marketing, distribution, and research. Getting it right can both generatebig profits and help end economic isolation throughout the developing world. Selling to the PoorBY KAY JOHNSON / XANHON Multinational firms are finding a surprisingly lucrative market in targeting low-income consumers The floodplains of Soc Trang province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta are a maze of rivers and canals dotted with villages so impoverished that local farmers earn less than $1 a day. It is not an obvious place to seek a fortune, but capitalism finds a way. Steering his ramshackle boat along the Ke Sat River, Nguyen Van Hon operates a floating sundries distributorship. E-commerce : The Bottom of Pyramid ApproachE-commerce : The Bottom of Pyramid Approach For centuries and most of the decades in the 20th century (i.e when computer was invented) access and communication was the tool of rich and ultra rich people, prohibitively expansive to ‘not so rich’ and ‘not at all rich’ people. All marketing research and development was focused on the 20% of the market based on the management principle 80:20, ignoring the vast 4 billion people who are at the bottom of the pyramid( read Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad, Wharton Publishing). |