Bottom Of Pyramid Essay

Bottom of Pyramid Marketing Strategies: A New Way to Achieve Corporate Economic Benefit and Social Impact Together

Ankita Dey

Prateek Singh Bapna

DoM, BITS Pilani

Bottom of Pyramid represents the world’s lowest socio-economic levels, which comprise of approximately 4 billion people who earn less than $2 per day. Fig. 1: World Economy Pyramid

Bottom of Pyramid Marketing is the way of business which can be large and small, domestic and multi-national, to target the poor family as consumers, and sell products and services to them at low cost, large scale, and thin margins to gain a new and improved revenue stream.

Bottom of Pyramid Marketing Strategies: 4A’s and 5D’s

Other than the 4P’s of Marketing Mix, managers need to understand the 4A’s

The major issue in front of the managers is to understand and implement the 4A’s. They have to make sure that the BoP population gets aware of the new products and existing products and services in the market. The next thing which is to be taken care is the access to these products and services. Further, as per the economic level of the BoP target groups, the price of the products need to be in the affordable range, so the managers are required to pay specific attention to that. The most important task is to make the products and services available to these target groups.

The 5D’s are Development, Design, Distribution, Demand and Dignity.

Moving on to the 5D’s of the BoP Marketing, the first thing to look up for the managers is the development, which implies what the value the product will impart for the target groups. The next important thing to be kept in mind is design of the product, which should be contextually relevant, appropriate and affordable. Since, logistics and transportation are important, distribution becomes critical to ensure the availability of the product.

Strategies for boosting

They distributed critical life saving drugs as Oral rehydration Therapy to the remotest area.

Demand: Uniliver, which has a wide range of products for lower income population, in their advertisements focus on the return on buyer’s investment. Rather than focusing on conventional advertising methods, they have always come up with the advertisements which are more appropriate in conveying the value of the product, the same which they have done in Wheel’s advertisement. Fig. 5- HUL’s Wheel Detergent Powder

Dignity: One example that explains dignity in BoP Marketing is the idea of Sammaan Foundation. Their idea is to systematize the working of all rickshaw pullers by bringing them under one roof, and modernize the cycle rickshaw pulling sector with small but creative changes. This makes it easier for the rickshaw pullers to drive and increase their income as well as through additional services such as selling bottled water, juices, courier and bills collection, and mobile recharge.

Now moving towards the 4A’s, we will see their implementation in BoP Marketing.

• To start with, the introduction of the single use sachet for Re.1 helped grew the shampoo market in