Marketing to the Poor

23. 12. 2009 | 22:19
Přečteno 8244 krát
I just completed Max Lenderman's Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates and Oligarchs are Reshaping Business, which somehow strikingly reminded me of Vijay Mahajan's Africa Rising: How 900 Million Consumers Offer More Than You Think, a title I'd polished off earlier during 2009.

The parallelisms between these two longitudinal studies especially dawned on me during Lenderman's final chapters where he delves fulsomely into the novel ways multinational (MNC) marketers have begun appealing to rural poor market segments. He describes how these strategies can then be applied in marketing to more affluent sections of the consumer public, suggesting ways to enhance the overall purchasing experience for tired Western customers and for companies to boost their brand loyalty.

Lenderman kicks his book off with a bit of a scholarly build-up, and you've got to first run this challenging gauntlet in order to grasp the crux of his overall argument. But the basic angle is that brands are losing mega market share to their aspiring competitors who seem to be honing the art of "experience marketing," one of Lenderman's pet pasions which he previous penned an entire book about.

"Experience marketing" is the act of creating sales experiences which are truly "win-win," where marketers can be lauded for doing something good for society and the collective, not merely lambasted for self-interestedly flogging product. It's an area where marketers can demonstrate their corporate social responsibility by taking active interests in the difficulties their customers might be facing. A good examples is the 2008 pilot project initiated by carmaker Hyundai to extend full money-back guarantees to their owners who were unable to meet their monthly payments on cars purchased under financing plans. Rather than being deluged by a raft of returns and a gargantuan loss of market share, Lenderman writes how the Koren automaker's gesture landed the company an immediate 2009 Q1 2009 15% upsurge in sales for the brand, far exceeding the manufacturer's gloomy conservative expectations.

Rural India, to wit, has become the battleground for many of these unusual "experiential" campaigns.

For instance, there exists the rural Indian fascination with all things Bollywood. Indian product marketers have thusly taken to the road in what are called "brand vans," complete with hired actors who re-enact famous Bollywood scenes or newly scripted encouters which are staged in front of expectant village throngs, actively making use of the product being marketed by demonstrating how the product comes come to the aid of the "hero" or "heroine" during the skit. Since rural Indians prefer to be shown how a product works, standard product appeals to its features or benefits are too abstract for this segment.

While this might seem gimmicky or inauthentic to a Western audience, in India this unconventional marketing technique has netted nothing short of windfalls for Indian consumer product companies, with examples listed in the book.

Lenderman understands that this marketing technique need not be taken verbatim from the Subcontinent's context applied directly to the West, but he hughlights the kernel of consumerist wisdom in what's going on down in India. If marketing interactions in the West can be tailored more personally and inclusively, disaffected consumers in developed economies might feel less put-upon. This new way of thinking about Western marketing, he explains, might be just the needed boost of genuineness to these otherwise contrived approaches. If marketers can somehow plant the seed of an idea that "this is how this helps us, but, moreover, this is how this helps you" it could convincingly shatter today's marketing and branding ennui. Shipwrecked as we are during these current economic crisis conditions, there is little doubt that brand-induced rigor mortis has firmly set in.

The author offers up a few prescriptions for how marketers can diversify their current approaches to break through the logjam:

  • marketing departments (along with their ad agency cohorts) need to brainstorm ways of selling stuff more personally to their target customers. Anything smacking of falsehood or inauthenticity will be immediately dismissed by a savvy 21st-century marketplace.

  • brands who do embrace the sales-marketing "win-win" will benefit in multiples, given the viral nature of social networks.

  • financial constraints which contrain the purchasing habits of poor market segments (egs. in India, across Africa, and in other parts of the developing world) from buying their way into more affluent lifestyles represent an opportunity, rather than a threat, to product manufactuters. Resource limitations can sometimes represent an advantage, as it forces brand leaders to do much more with significantly less.

  • marketers must appeal to the 2B-plus poor, underdeveloped, members of the planet, who shall quickly constitute the lion's share of their future sales. With the latter's rising affluence and aspirational lifestyles, class upgrades will be demanded, and product floggers who understand this will be there when the bell tolls. In observing the poor, their buying habits, and by understanding their unqiue situation, it will inspire creative new branding approaches.

  • marketers who opt to ignore this message will likely not survive the coming decade's market reshuffling.


Both of these books are quick, though deep, reads, and I highly recommend them.

If your marketing strategy is currently dry and lifeless, you might want to generate some radical new thinking with these two provocative titles.

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