Business Strategies for the Bottom of the Pyramid (Collection)

4. Harnessing the Hanouti: Opportunities in Organizing the Market

The African market is informal and disorganized, so creating opportunities often means looking for ways to organize the market. Companies are finding opportunities by moving informal retailing into more formal and organized stores, transforming informal and illegal markets into formal markets, and organizing secondhand markets. They are also branding unbranded products and organizing transportation and distribution.

In Morocco, most retail sales are made through the 80,000 small, neighborhood retail shops known as hanout. One of the things that seems to make these mom-and-pop hanouti shops impenetrable to competition from organized chains is the credit and close relationships they ...