Marketing, Poverty and Social Responsibility at the Base-of-the-Pyramid

Seminal pieces on the bottom of the pyramid model (e.g., Prahalad, 2005; Prahalad and Hart, 2002) have stimulated discussion on the role of business in developing markets. The main argument in these discussions has been to recognize and acknowledge the market potential of those who live on less than $2 per day, a market of over four billion people. While appealing in its promise for business and poor consumers alike, BoP models to date are focused on demand stimulation and seem to advocate a mere transplantation of the marketing and consumer models that have worked well in developed economies, without recognizing the need to address associated problems. This approach ignores the input of the poor people who are most affected by these schemes (Simalis and Hart 2008; p. 1). Corporate social responsibility in these contexts is defined merely by way of training the poor them to be global consumers like the rest of us.