Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit

CHAPTER EIGHT

Creating Emerging Market Entrepreneurs

FROM PYRAMID TO DIAMOND, FROM AID TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.

—Ole Danbolt Mjøs¹

 

This statement from the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee led Grameen Bank, Bangladesh’s microfinance institution and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, to be the cowinners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The award was an important milestone in the world’s effort to reduce poverty, as stated in the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals.

Eradicating poverty is arguably humankind’s biggest challenge.² The challenge is to transform the structure of wealth in the community from a pyramid to a diamond. A pyramid means there are a few people who have very high purchasing power at the top of the pyramid. More consumers will be at the medium section of the pyramid and the majority of consumers at the very bottom.³ The pyramid must be reshaped into a diamond. In other words, more people at the bottom of the pyramid should have higher purchasing power and therefore move to the middle level. The bottom of the pyramid will shrink and the middle will fatten.

This has been happening dramatically in China as its economy grows at a fast rate and becomes a world power. Fareed Zakaria found that poverty alleviation is happening at a faster rate in China ...