Innovating for the Less Affluent Consumer in Emerging Markets: An Abstract

Abstract

When marketers strategize for social impact, a critical decision is to serve the poor, marginalized, less affluent consumer in emerging markets by a useful product with an embedded social purpose. While emerging markets are attractive due to their high and persisting growth, many emerging markets also display high levels of inequality. The high economic growth may likely not reach those at “bottom of the pyramid”. Thus, there is a continuing need to provide innovative products for those at the margins still experiencing deprivation. However, there is insufficient theoretical underpinning to unpack the poor consumers understanding of products with an embedded social purpose and guide marketing managers in product development and strategy. Adopting a subaltern lens, this study employed video-ethnography in two major cities in Bangladesh, to uncover the lived experience of poor consumers of the innovation of a fortified yoghurt, Shokti doi. Though little used in marketing, the subaltern perspective is appropriate as it enables the view of people subordinated due to conditions of belonging to different class, age gender, caste, etc. to emerge. It presents a viewpoint of those masses usually unrepresented. Video-ethnography also allows a richer, deeper understanding of consumers’ lives. The impact of the innovative product, a fortified yoghurt, on poor consumers is interpreted in five themes: desperate need, commodified hope, democratization of value, (de)marginalization, and furnish trust. These themes are then related to processes of engagement with the product of access, experience and advocacy. The processes and themes are interpreted within the overarching hegemony and marginalization of the poor consumers. We interpret and discuss these findings and then consider the implications for theory, practice and policy in emerging markets, followed by limitations and future research directions.