Profitable Business Models and Market Creation in the Context of Deep Poverty: A Strategic View

By C. Seelos, Johanna Mair. 2007

756 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Executive Overview The bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in the global distribution of income has been promoted as a significant opportunity for companies to grow profitably. Under the BOP approach, poor people are identified as potential customers who can be served if companies learn to fundamentally rethink their existing strategies and business models. This involves acquiring and building new resources and capabilities and forging a multitude of local partnerships. However, current BOP literature remains relatively silent about how to actually implement such a step into the unknown. We use two BOP cases to illustrate a strategic framework that reduces managerial complexity. In our view, existing capabilities and existing local BOP models can be leveraged to build new markets that include the poor and generate sufficient financial returns for companies to justify investments.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f85fc0f7ff8d00c5b4c9ffcbe59fa48560eac116

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Citations in the corpus

Sharing and Shaping: A Cross-Country Comparison of How Sharing Economy Firms Shape Their Institutional Environment to Gain Legitimacy (2018, background): “…of regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions—such as, government regulations and public perceptions—is no less important to organizational performance than business success in the marketplace (Hillman & Hitt, 1999; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Marquis & Qian, 2014; Seelos & Mair, 2007).”
Building Inclusive Markets in Rural Bangladesh: How Intermediaries Work Institutional Voids (2012, background): “-Marta Nussbaum Researchers and policy makers have long argued that markets are engines for economic growth and that market-based activities constitute an important tool for social progress, economic empowerment, and human development (Seelos & Mair, 2007; Stiglitz, 1989; UNDP, 2008).”
The Embeddedness of Social Entrepreneurship: Understanding Variation Across Local Communities (2010, neutral): “Seelos and Mair (2007) highlight the many regulative issues and hurdles that delayed and hindered the establishment of SEKEM, an SEO that aims to contribute to the development of Egypt in the economic, cultural and social spheres.”
Business Model Innovation and Sources of Value Creation in Low-Income Markets (2010, positive): “Accordingly, extending the traditional concept of value creation through the analysis of interactions is a key issue in low-income markets, where it is commonly highlighted the need of achieving common benefits for all the parties involved through partnerships with formal and informal partners (Hart”
Bridging the institutional divide: Partnerships in subsistence markets (2012, background): “…actors, for businesses seeking to establish a presence and have a positive impact in subsistence markets (e.g., Crawford-Mathis, Darr, and Farmer, 2010; Dahan, Doh, Oetzel, and Yaziji, 2010; Johnson, 2007; London, Rondinelli, and O Neill, 2006; Seelos and Mair, 2007; Simanis and Hart, 2008) .”
A Quantitative Comparison of Social and Commercial Entrepreneurship: Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of Social Entrepreneurship Organizations in Context (2013, background): “In this paper, we broadly define social entrepreneurial activity as ‘individuals, organizations or initiatives engaged in entrepreneurial activities with a social goal’ (Seelos and Mair 2007, Bosma and Levie 2010).”
Visual tools for business model innovation: Recommendations from a cognitive perspective (2017, neutral): “Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart (2007, 2010), and Seelos and Mair (2007) have developed unique notations that combine the core notation of CLDs with other symbols (e.g. color-coding).”
The business model: Present and future—beyond a skeumorph (2013, background): “For example, models here can evolve in this context because these organizations can share with each other rather than compete (Seelos and Mair, 2005, 2007).”
The Case for a Socially Oriented Business Model Canvas: The Social Enterprise Model Canvas (2019, background): “The first example is the mechanism of the inclusive business model applied to some SEs that aim at ‘serving the poor profitably’ (Prahalad 2006) by delivering goods or services to the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BOP), the largest and poorest socioeconomic groups.”
Sourcing for the base of the pyramid: Constructing supply chains to address voids in subsistence markets (2015, neutral): “There is some work that explores the http://dx.doi. challenges of BOP distribution and marketing (London and Hart, 2004; Seelos and Mair, 2007; Vachani and Smith, 2008), but little on upstream supply chains.”
Corporate Social Responsibility at the Base of the Pyramid (2013, methodology): “For example, Prahalad and Hart (2002) define the BoP as 4 billion people living on less than $1500 per year and this figure is used by Anderson and Markides (2007), London and Hart (2004), and Seelos and Mair (2007).”