23 Feb intermediaries were bypassed, and ITC gained a direct contact with the farmers, thus improving the efÞ ciency of ITCÕs soy-bean acquisition. To achieve this goal, it had to do much more th

marketing case study and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

What are some of the basic marketing considerations to address when targeting the BOP?

Should Marketers sell a profit to the BOP OR is it socially irresponsible to profit from people with little disposable income explain why?
What role does ethnocentrism play in Marketers decision making? What is the most effective way to control the influence of Ethnocentrism and explain it?
No more than 2 pages. single spaced. No outside source. Case is attached in the PDF file
Requirements: 2 page max
intermediaries were bypassed, and ITC gained a direct contact with the farmers, thus improving the efÞ ciency of ITCÕs soy-bean acquisition. To achieve this goal, it had to do much more than just distribute PCs. It had to provide equipment for man-aging power outages, solar panels for extra electricity, and a satellite-based telephone hookup, and it had to train farmers to use the PCs. Without these steps, the PCs would never have worked. The complex solution serves ITC very well. Now more than 10,000 villages and more than 1 million farmers are cov-ered by its system. ITC is able to pay more to farmers and at the same time cut its costs because it has dramatically reduced the inefÞ ciencies in logistics. The vast market for cell phones among those at the BOP is not for phones costing $200 or even $100 but for phones cost-ing less than $50. Such a phone cannot simply be a cut-down version of an existing handset. It must be very reliable and have lots of battery capacity, as it will be used by people who do not have reliable access to electricity. Motorola went thorough four redesigns to develop a low-cost cell phone with battery life as long as 500 hours for villagers without regular electricity and an extra-loud volume for use in noisy markets. MotorolaÕs low-cost phone, a no-frills cell phone priced at $40, has a standby time of two weeks and conforms to local languages and customs. The cell-phone manufacturer says it expects to sell 6 million cell phones in six months in markets including China, India, and Turkey. BOP MARKETING REQUIRES CREATIVE FINANCING There is also demand for personal computers but again, at very low prices. To meet the needs of this market, Advanced Micro Devices markets a $185 Personal Internet communicatorÑa basic computer for developing countriesÑand a Taiwan Company offers a similar device costing just $100. For most products, demand is contingent on the customer having sufÞ cient purchasing power. Companies have to devise creative ways to assist those at the BOP to Þ nance larger pur-chases. For example, Cemex, the worldÕs third-largest cement company, recognized an opportunity for proÞ t by enabling lower-income Mexicans to build their own homes. The com-panyÕs Patrimonio Hoy Programme , a combination builderÕs Òclub and Þ nancing plan that targets homeowners who make less than $5 a day, markets building kits using its premium-grade cement. It recruited 510 promoters to persuade new customers to commit to building additions to their homes. The customers paid Cemex $11.50 a week and received building materials every 10 weeks until the room was Þ nished (about 70 weeksÑcustomers were on their own for the actual build-ing). Although poor, 99.6 percent of the 150,000 Patrimo-nio Hoy participants have paid their bills in full. Patrimonio Hoy attracted 42,000 new customers and is expected to turn a $1.5 million proÞ t next year. Marketing to the Bottom of the PyramidCASE 33 Professor C. K. PrahaladÕs seminal publication, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid , suggests an enormous market at the Òbottom of the pyramid (BOP)Ña group of some 4 billion peo-ple who subsist on less than $2 a day. By some estimates, these Òaspirational poor, who make up three-fourths of the worldÕs population, represent $14 trillion in purchasing power, more than Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Japan put to-gether. Demographically, it is young and growing at 6 percent a year or more. Traditionally, the poor have not been considered an important market segment. ÒThe poor canÕt afford most products; Òthey will not accept new technologies; and Òexcept for the most basic prod-ucts, they have little or no use for most products sold to higher in-come market segmentsÑthese are some of the assumptions that have, until recently, caused most multinational Þ rms to pay little or no attention to those at the bottom of the pyramid. Typical market analysis is limited to urban areas, thereby ignoring rural villages where, in markets like India, the majority of the population lives. However, as major markets become more competitive and in some cases saturatedÑwith the resulting ever-thinning proÞ t marginsÑmarketing to the bottom of the pyramid may have real potential and be worthy of exploration. One researcher suggested that American and European busi-nesses should go back and look at their own roots. Sears, Roe-buck was created to serve the lower-income, sparsely settled rural market. Singer sewing machines fashioned a scheme to make con-sumption possible by allowing customers to pay $5 a month instead of $100 at once. The worldÕs largest company today, Walmart, was created to serve the lower-income market. Here are a few examples of multinational company efforts to overcome the challenges in marketing to the BOP. Designing products for the BOP is not about making cheap stuff but about making technologically advanced products af-fordable. For example, one company was inspired to invent the Freeplay, a windup self-powerÐgenerating radio, when it learned that isolated, impoverished people in South Africa were not getting information about AIDS because they had no electricity for radios and could not afford replacement batteries. BOP MARKETING REQUIRES ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY The BOP market has a need for advanced technology, but to be usable, infrastructure support must often accompany the technology. For example, ITC, a $2.6 billion a year Indian con-glomerate, decided to create a network of PC kiosks in villages. For years, ITC conducted its business with farmers through a maze of intermediaries, from brokers to traders. The company wanted farmers to be able to connect directly to information sources to check ITCÕs offer price for produce, as well as prices in the closest village market, in the state capital, and on the Chicago commodities exchange. With direct access to infor-mation, farmers got the best price for their product, hordes of cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 10cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 108/27/10 2:14 PM8/27/10 2:14 PM
Cases 3 Assessing Global Market Opportunities single-use sachets of Sunsilk shampoo and Omo laundry de-tergent, which he sells to riverside shopkeepers for as little as 2.5 cents each. At his Þ rst stop he makes deliveries to a half dozen small shops. He sells hundred of thousands of soap and shampoo packets a month, enough to earn about $125ÑÞ ve times his pre-vious monthly salary as a junior Communist party ofÞ cial. ÒItÕs a hard life, but its getting better. Now, he Òhas enough to pay his daughterÕs schools fees and soon . . . will have saved enough to buy a bigger boat, so I can sell to more villages. Because of aggressive efforts to reach remote parts of the country through an extensive network of more than 100,000 independent sales representatives such as Hon, the Vietnam subsidiary of Unile-ver realized a 23 percent increase in sales last year to more than $300 million. BOP MARKETING REQUIRES AFFORDABLE PACKAGING As one observer noted, Òthe poor cannot be Walmartized. Con-sumers in rich nations use money to stockpile convenience. We go to SamÕs Club, Costco, Kmart, and so on, to get bargain prices and the convenience of buying shampoos and paper towels by the case. Selling to the poor requires just the opposite approach. They do not have the cash to stockpile convenience, and they do not mind frequent trips to the village store. Products have to be made avail-able locally and in affordable units; fully 60 percent of the value of all shampoo sold in India is in single-serve packets. NestlŽ is targeting China with a blitz of 29 new ice cream brands, many selling for as little as 12 cents with take-home and multipack products ranging from 72 cents to $2.30. It also features products specially designed for local tastes and prefer-ences of Chinese consumers, such as NestlŽ Snow Moji, a rice pastry Þ lled with vanilla ice cream that resembles dim sum, and other ice cream ß avors like red bean and green tea. The ice cream products are distributed through a group of small independent saleswomen, which the company aims to expand to 4,000 women by next year. The project is expected to account for as much as 24 percent of the companyÕs total rural sales within the next few years. BOP MARKETING CREATES HEALTH BENEFITS Albeit a promotion to sell products, marketing to BOP does help improve personal hygiene. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that diarrhea-related diseases kill 1.8 million people a year and noted that better hand-washing habitsÑusing soapÑis one way to prevent their spread. In response to WHO urging, Hin-dustan Lever Company introduced a campaign called ÒSwasthya Chetna or ÒGlowing Health, which argues that even clean-looking hands may carry dangerous germs, so use more soap. It began a concentrated effort to take this message into the tens of thousands of villages where the rural poor reside, often with little access to media. ÒLifebuoy teams visit each village several times, using a ÒGlo Germ kit to show schoolchildren that soap-washed hands are cleaner. This program has reached Òaround 80 million rural folk, and sales of Lifebuoy in small affordable sizes have risen sharply. The small bar has become the brandÕs top seller. One customer, Diega Chavero, thought the scheme was a scam when she Þ rst heard of it, but after eight years of being unable to save enough to expand the one-room home where her family of six lived, she was willing to try anything. Four years later, she has Þ ve bedrooms. ÒNow I have a palace. Another deterrent to the development of small enterprises at the BOP is available sources of adequate Þ nancing for microdis-tributors and budding entrepreneurs. For years, those at the bottom of the pyramid needing loans in India had to depend on local mon-eylenders, at interest rates up to 500 percent a year. ICICI Bank, the second-largest banking institution in India, saw these people as a potential market and critical to its future. To convert them into customers in a cost-effective way, ICICI turned to village self-help groups. ICICI Bank met with microÞ nance-aid groups working with the poor and decided to give them capital to start making small loans to the poorÑat rates that run from 10 percent to 30 percent. This sounds usurious, but it is lower than the 10 percent daily rate that some Indian loan sharks charge. Each group was composed of 20 women who were taught about saving, borrowing, investing, and so on. Each woman contributes to a joint savings account with the other members, and based on the self-help groupÕs track re-cord of savings, the bank then lends money to the group, which in turn lends money to its individual members. ICICI has developed 10,000 of these groups reaching 200,000 women. ICICIÕs money has helped 1 million households get loans that average $120 to $140. The bankÕs executive directory says the venture has been Òvery proÞ table. ICICI is working with local communities and NGOs to enlarge its reach. BOP MARKETING REQUIRES EFFECTIVE DISTRIBUTION When Unilever saw that dozens of agencies were lending micro-credit loans funds to poor women all over India, it thought that these would-be microentrepreneurs needed businesses to run. Uni-lever realized it could not sell to the bottom of the pyramid un-less it found low-cost ways to distribute its product, so it created a network of hundreds of thousands of Shakti Amma (Òempowered mothers) who sell LeverÕs products in their villages through an Indian version of Tupperware parties. Start-up loans enabled the women to buy stocks of goods to sell to local villagers. In one case, a woman who received a small loan was able to repay her start-up loan and has not needed to take another one. She now sells regularly to about 50 homes and even serves as a miniwholesaler, stocking tiny shops in outlying villages a short bus ride from her own. She sells about 10,000 rupees ($230) of goods each month, keeps about $26 proÞ t, and ploughs the rest back into new stock. While the $26 a month she earns is less than the average $40 monthly income in the area, she now has income, whereas before she had nothing. Today about 1,300 poor women are selling UnileverÕs prod-ucts in 50,000 villages in 12 states in India and account for about 15 percent of the companyÕs rural sales in those states. Over-all, rural markets account for about 30 percent of the companyÕs revenue. In another example, Nguyen Van Hon operates a ß oating sun-dries distributorship along the Ke Sat River in VietnamÕs Mekong DeltaÑa maze of rivers and canals dotted with villages. His boat is Þ lled with boxes containing small bars of Lifebuoy soap and cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 11cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 118/27/10 2:14 PM8/27/10 2:14 PM
Part 6 Supplementary Material2. Marketing to the BOP raises a number of issues revolving around the social responsibility of marketing efforts. Write a position paper either pro or con on one of the following: a. Is it exploitation for a company to proÞ t from selling soaps, shampoo, personal computers, and ice cream, and so on, to people with little disposable income? b. Can making loans to customers whose income is less than $100 monthly at interest rates of 20 percent to pur-chase TVs, cell phones, and other consumer durables be justiÞ ed? c. One authority argues that squeezing proÞ ts from people with little disposable incomeÑand often not enough to eatÑis not capitalist exploitation but rather that it stimu-lates economic growth. QUESTIONS 1. As a junior member of your companyÕs committee to explore new markets, you have received a memo from the chairper-son telling you to be prepared at the next meeting to discuss key questions that need to be addressed if the company de-cides to look further into the possibility of marketing to the BOP segment. The ultimate goal of this meeting will be to establish a set of general guidelines to use in developing a market strategy for any one of the companyÕs products to be marketed to the Òaspirational poor. These guidelines need not be company or product speciÞ c at this time. In fact, think of the Þ nal guideline as a checklistÑa series of questions that a company could use as a start in evaluating the potential of a speciÞ c BOP market segment for one of its products. Sources: C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2004); Stefan Stern, ÒHow Serving the Poorest Can Bring Rich Rewards, Management Today, August 2004; Kay Johnson and Xa Nhon, ÒSelling to the Poor: There Is a Surprisingly Lucrative Market in Targeting Low-Income Consumers, Time , April 25, 2005; Cris Prystay, ÒIndiaÕs Small Loans Yield Big Markets, Asian Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2005; C. K. Prahalad, ÒWhy Selling to the Poor Makes for Good Business, Fortune, November 15, 2004; Alison Maitland, ÒA New Frontier in Responsibility, Financial Times, November 29, 2004; Normandy Madden, ÒNestlŽ Hits Mainland with Cheap Ice Cream, Advertising Age, March 7, 2005; Ritesh Gupta, ÒRural Consumers Get Closer to Established World Brands, Ad Age Global, June 2002; Alison Overholt, ÒA New Path to ProÞ t, Fast Company, January 1, 2005; Patrick Whitney, ÒDesigning for the Base of the Pyramid, Design Management Review, Fall 2004; C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, ÒFortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Strategy & Business 26 (2002); C. K. Prahalad and Aline Hammond, ÒServing the WorldÕs Poor, ProÞ tably, Harvard Busi-ness Review, September 2002; ÒThe Invisible Market, Across the Board , September/October 2004; Anuradha Mittal and Lori Wallach, ÒSelling Out the Poor, Foreign Policy, September/October 2004; G. Pascal Zachary, ÒPoor Idea, New Republic, March 7, 2005; ÒCalling an End to Poverty, The Economist , July 9, 2005; Susanna Howard, ÒP&G, Unilever Court the WorldÕs Poor, The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2005; Rajiv Banerjee and N. Shatrujeet, ÒShoot to the Heart, Economic Times, July 6, 2005; David Ignatius, ÒPennies from the Poor Add Up to Fortune, Korea Herald, July 7, 2005; Rebecca Buckman, ÒCell Phone Game Rings in New Niche: Ultra Cheap, The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2005, p. B4; ÒItÕs Good Business, but a Strategy that Saves Lives as Well, The Boston Globe, June 10, 2007; ÒGlobal Executive: See the Poor as Entrepreneurs, Con-sumers, Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN, July 30, 2007; ÒThe Right Package; It Started With Shampoo but Now Sachets Have Overtaken Shop Shelves, India Today, December 31, 2007; ÒThe Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through ProÞ ts, South Asian Journal of Management, April 1, 2007; ÒThe Legacy that Got Left on the ShelfÐUnilever and Emerging Markets, The Economist, February 2, 2008. cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 12cat2994X_case3_001-019.indd 128/27/10 2:14 PM8/27/10 2:14 PM

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