No abstract

This article uses insights gained from the unique context of subsistence marketplaces, or the base of the pyramid, to put forth a sustainable market orientation for businesses. Using qualitative research and case studies of businesses, ingraining social good in a product-relevant sense is argued to be central and essential for businesses in subsistence contexts to be successful. This analysis is unique in taking a bottom-up in orientation and begins at the microlevel, drawing on psychological and sociological aspects of subsistence marketplaces to derive macrolevel implications.Keywords subsistence marketplaces, base of the pyramid, sustainability, poverty, literacy Understanding and alleviating poverty is crucial to the development of sustainable marketplaces. This paper focuses on subsistence marketplaces characterized by demanding, resource-constrained conditions-and yet unfolding and potentially vast opportunities. These conditions pose challenges to conventional business research and practice, which have developed predominantly through a focus on relatively resource-rich settings. This work is in keeping with the state-of-the-art in this area by examining how, rather than whether, businesses can function in subsistence marketplaces. Recent work has examined poverty from a variety of perspectives, including distributive justice (Hill, Felice, and Ainscough 2007), empowerment and exclusion (Varman and Vikas 2007), consumption and entrepreneurship in subsistence (Viswanathan, Gajendiran, and Venkatesan 2008), social marketing (Kotler, Roberto, and Leisner 2006), market orientation (Carman and Dominguez 2001), and business strategy (Prahalad 2005). This article builds on these perspectives, using the understanding of microlevel reality to derive macrolevel implications. Specifically, insights from the unique context of subsistence marketplaces (Viswanathan and Rosa 2007), or the base of the pyramid (Prahalad 2005), are used to propose a sustainable market orientation for businesses.Distinct from other orientations, such as societal marketing or corporate social responsibility (CSR), a sustainable market orientation that involves ingraining product-relevant social good in businesses is proposed, wherein customer and societal welfare concerns permeate business activities and move to the center of strategic planning. Ingraining product-relevant social good is defined as the development of a deep-seated organizational understanding of individual and community welfare as it relates to product offerings, the incorporation of the goal of enhancing such welfare into business processes, outcomes, and assessments, and the inculcation of product-relevant social good into the organizational culture. ''Ingraining'' refers to a fundamental orientation that affects the knowledge acquired by the organization, the processes, outcomes, and performance metrics of the organization and the culture of the organization. ''Good'' is not referred to in a generic sense but rather focused on how business can enhance the welfare of individ...

This article describes the findings of an immersive program of field research on consumers living in poverty in South India and the lessons learned from the development and operation of educational interventions designed to enhance the marketplace literacy of these consumers. Whereas extant research and practice have traditionally addressed two key factors that facilitate market participation for the poor—market access and financial resources—the current research focuses on a third critical and complementary factor—namely, marketplace literacy. The authors contend that to sustainably benefit from enhanced market access and resources, (1) people living in subsistence conditions need to develop tactical or procedural knowledge, or concrete “know-how,” regarding how to be an informed consumer or seller, and (2) this know-how must be grounded in conceptual/strategic knowledge, or “know-why” understanding, of marketplace exchanges. To that end, the educational program outlined begins by familiarizing participants with the purpose and logic of marketplaces and then transitions to the tangible aspects of how these marketplaces function. The article concludes with reflection on the implications for consumer policy, marketing research, and business practice.

This research examines how low-literate consumers use nutritional labels on packages and the ways such usage can be facilitated. Using research on nutritional labeling and on low-literate consumers as bases, the authors design an experiment to test specific hypotheses about the effects of graphic versus nongraphic formats on usage of nutrition information by consumers with different levels of literacy. The authors discuss implications of the findings for further research and for public policy.

No abstract