Marketing in Subsistence Marketplaces

Management research has recently begun to shed new light on the role and nature of business innovations targeted at subsistence marketplaces (Viswanathan and Rosa 2007), the four billion poor that have also been referred to as constituting the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prahalad 2005). The notion that ways might be found for business to effectively serve the needs of subsistence markets is gaining increasing currency, and holds promise for both firms and consumers. For firms, it constitutes potential access to a vast, undertapped market for products and services. For subsistence consumers, it includes the promise of affordable access to products hitherto unaffordable or unavailable. Although gaining momentum, this viewpoint still faces many challenges, including the central question of whether business really can help to overcome the problem of poverty. We contend that the best way to begin to address such issues is to develop deep understanding of the lives of individuals living in subsistence conditions. This paves the way for a bottom-up, grounded understanding of the potential for business to contribute to economic and social development among the poor. Our subsistence marketplaces perspective is a bottom up approach to understanding buyer, seller, and marketplace behavior that complements mid-level business strategy approaches, such as the base of the pyramid approach, and macro-level economic approaches to studying business and poverty that currently exist in the literature.