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Companies are recognizing and pursuing the opportunity to serve the market known as the base of the pyramid (BOP), i.e., consumers who live in poverty in developing countries. The BOP constitutes the largest remaining global market frontier for businesses. Until recently, it has been ignored because of its seeming unattractiveness and insurmountable challenges compared with middle-and high-income markets. However, BOP consumers desire and are able to pay for quality products tailored to their needs. In response, firms are developing new products specific to the demands and conditions of this low-income population. To innovate effectively, ensuring new products are well received, firms need to know how to enhance new product adoption among these consumers despite the barriers of poverty. We address this need by developing a model of adoption contextualized to the BOP. Based on theories of innovation and poverty, and drawing on the emergent subsistence market literature, we propose that certain new product characteristics, social context dynamics, and marketing environment approaches moderate or counter some of the limits of poverty, making adoption possible. We then discuss the managerial and theoretical implications of our model for innovation practitioners and researchers.

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The increasing globalization of markets and businesses and the criticality of new products to business performance make the relationship between national culture and new product development an important area for academic research and managerial practice. By means of a literature review, the authors attempt to provide an understanding of this relationship in terms of the links between new product development on the one hand and the five dimensions of national culture—individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and Confucian dynamic—on the other. They advance several propositions for additional research, develop a conceptual model, and identify directions for further exploration of the relationship.

A growing concern among international marketing managers is how to increase the market orientation and thereby performance of their transnational organizations. This study broaches this issue by investigating how the marketing concept, the heart of the market orientation, may be established in a multinational setting and the effects of national culture on that process. From a wide array of literature, the authors construct a theoretical framework and propositions on how global organizations may transform this philosophy from an abstract platitude to an operational reality. Their findings suggest that the process consists of complex, interdependent steps—interpretation, adoption, and implementation of the marketing concept. Cultural values shape interpretation and facilitate or impede adoption and implementation. The overall framework and findings can be used to guide institutionalization of the marketing concept across the organizational span, in particular by anticipating culture-based reactions from international subsidiaries.