Journal of
Marketing Development and Competitiveness
Scholar Gateway
Abstracts prior to volume 5(1) have been archived!Issue 5(1), October 2010 -- Paper AbstractsGirard (p. 9-22)Cooper (p. 23-32)Kunz-Osborne (p. 33-41)Coulmas-Law (p.42-46)Stasio (p. 47-56)Albert-Valette-Florence (p.57-63)Zhang-Rauch (p. 64-70)Alam-Yasin (p. 71-78)Mattare-Monahan-Shah (p. 79-94)Nonis-Hudson-Hunt (p. 95-106) 
JOURNAL OF APPLIED BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
Making the Case for Harming the Poor – A Review of Marketing
Tactics at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Author(s): Shruti Gupta, Anand Kumar Jaiswal
Citation: Shruti Gupta, Anand Kumar Jaiswal, (2013) "Making the Case for Harming the Poor – A Review of Marketing Tactics at the Bottom of the Pyramid," Journal of Applied Business and Economics, Vol. 14, Iss. 5, pp. 30-40
Article Type: Research paper
Publisher: North American Business Press
Abstract:
Pioneering research by Prahalad and others under the term “Bottom of Pyramid” (BOP) has stressed for
a long time that marketing to the world’s poor is a profitable endeavor for companies. The overriding
assumption in this BOP proposition has been that the poor are consumers and make purchase decisions
similar to the consumers in the remainder of the pyramid. At the same time, the BOP proposition has
been criticized to be exploitative and unethical in nature, especially because the poor are perceived as
being vulnerable to marketplace practices. Using a case based approach we describe sample marketing
programs in India to provide secondary evidence in support of the above critical view. The paper
concludes with an alternative approach to marketing to BOP consumers that doesn’t exploit the
vulnerable population.
