Perspective- After years of sparse rain, the floodgates opened May 7, 2013 Niti Bhan
- Impact of mainstreaming and commodification of cyber cafe services May 4, 2013 Niti Bhan
- The role of the cyber cafe: Assisted entry ramp onto the information superhighway to use a cliche May 4, 2013 Niti Bhan
- Estimating price in unexplored and untapped markets May 3, 2013 Niti Bhan
- Mobile phones and China: Two concurrent factors of global urbanization of rural African market towns. May 3, 2013 Niti Bhan
Category Archives: Mobile platform
Demanding savvy customers at the BoP
Probably the most successful global BoP consumer product today is the mobile phone and its attendant services. While there's fodder for a separate post to follow contained within that specific sentence, this one looks at the reasonably maturing market as … Continue reading
India’s telco price wars; a street view
This issue of Businessworld caught my eye on the flight from India, with its accompanying cover story full of informative graphs and numbers. Anecdotal evidence from the rental car driver tells me that some gaps exist between marketing and the … Continue reading
Can big business save the world? It depends…
Jared Diamond's op ed in the NYT struck me with the question he posed, which is whether big business can save the world. Diamond went on to use Walmart, Chevron and Coca Cola as examples. I leave it to you … Continue reading
Godrej: Setting the bar for BoP innovation in consumer marketing?
Image of Godrej Chotukool from the WSJ Distracted by the coolness of the product, I overlooked the real story developing in the Indian consumer market. New ways of distributing, new ways of creating and meeting demand, in ways that proffer … Continue reading
Reflecting on managing retail at the BoP (Prepaid Economy project)
Ma Fe's sari sari shop, The Philippines, March 1st, 2009 When I think about my time in the filipino village earlier this year, the most significant learnings from the field are the ones I never really wrote about or pondered … Continue reading
Entering BoP markets successfully – behemoth or startup?
Late last week I met a packaging designer based out of Beijing who happened to be in Helsinki on a company visit. He posed an interesting question, from his perspective, that a behemoth multinational could easily address all the various … Continue reading
BoP market segmentation: a chicken and egg dilemma?
The idea that has captured my imagination for the past couple of day is the question I've attempted to pose in the title of this post. "Consumers" do not exist, they are not a human archetype like hunter, hero, traveler … Continue reading
Creating a market among the BoP: my ethical struggles online
Its interesting for me to note that the category "Ethics" has been a part of this blog from its inception although I'll confess to not really knowing why I was adding it to the list. I've the least amount of … Continue reading
Lessons from the BoP 10: Life is hard; make it easy to use, easy to choose
Photo credit: Goverdhan Meena, Rawal village, Rajasthan India Jan 2009 When Goverdhan, my local fixer in Sawai Madhopur shared these photos he'd taken in his village back in January when I was doing the prepaid reserach in rural India, I … Continue reading
Lessons from the BoP 8: Assumptions of contextual knowledge questioned to lower barriers to acceptance
Quite a few people, all quite wellknown in their fields, mostly from high tech industries, have said the equivalent regarding the BoP – "just give them the technology and they'll figure everything else out, look how creative they are etc" … Continue reading
