Sustainable Business & Subsistence Markets

This book is the result of several years of research, curriculum development, and testing of a consumer and entrepreneurial literacy educational program for low-literate, low-income adults in India. Whereas there has been considerable attention on microfinancing in recent decades, we describe an educational program that focuses on enabling generic skills about the marketplace and complements these important efforts. We conducted research aimed at understanding lives and marketplaces in subsistence contexts in urban and rural parts of a state in South India. We used the research as a basis for developing a consumer and entrepreneurial literacy educational program. This program uses the "know-why" or an understanding of marketplaces as a basis for the know-how of being an informed buyer or seller. Despite the dificulties with abstract thinking that low-literate individuals experience, we enable deeper understanding of marketplaces by leveraging the social skills that participants bring to the program and relating educational content back to their lived experiences. Such understanding can enable individuals to embark on a path to lifelong learning. A detailed explanation of the evolution of this work follows.

Discussions of base of the economic pyramid (BOP) markets have, until now, relied principally on business case studies and rough estimates of market size. The Next 4 Billion uses previously unreleased data to measure market opportunity at the BOP. constitute the base of the economic pyramid (BOP). New empirical measures of their aggregate purchasing power and behavior as consumers suggest significant opportunities for market-based approaches to better meet their needs, increase their productivity and incomes, and empower their entry into the formal economy. surveys of developing and transition countries, offers a new and compelling perspective on low-income communities worldwide. Drawing on income data from 110 countries and standardized expenditure data from 36 countries across the globe, The Next 4 Billion is an important first look at the market opportunity represented by four billion individuals who make up the BOP. characterization of BOP markets, at several levels of analysis: How large is the BOP and what is its income-by country and region? What is total market size and consumer ability to pay within a number of critical sectors, including water and sanitation, energy, IT/telecom, healthcare, and financial services? What is nature of the penalty faced by BOP consumers in the form of higher prices, poorer quality goods and services, or lack of access to services? What does the BOP penalty imply for needed policy reforms or opportunities for market rationalization?

In this book, legendary marketing expert Philip Kotler and social marketing innovator Nancy Lee consider poverty from a radically different and powerfully new viewpoint: that of the marketer. Kotler and Lee assess each proposed path to poverty reduction, from traditional large-scale foreign aid to improved education and job training, economic development to microfinance. They offer powerful new insights into why so many anti-poverty programs fail - and propose a new paradigm that can achieve far better results. Kotler and Lee show how to apply advanced marketing strategies and techniques - including segmentation, targeting, and positioning - to systematically put in place the conditions poor people need to escape poverty. Through real case studies, you'll learn how these marketing techniques can help promote health, education, community building, personal motivation, and more. The authors provide the first complete, marketing-informed methodology for addressing specific poverty-related problems - and assessing the results. They also demonstrate how national and local anti-poverty programs can be improved by more effectively linking government, NGOs, and private companies. Over the past 30 years, the authors' social marketing techniques have been successfully applied to health care, environmental protection, family planning, and many other social challenges. Now, Kotler and Lee show how they can be applied to the largest social challenge of all: global poverty.