I would like to invite you to submit a chapter proposal to my forthcoming book entitled " Bottom of the Pyramid Marketing: Making, Shaping and Developing BOP Markets". This book is designed to offer new insights into emerging and cutting-edge knowledge in marketing to the bottom of the pyramid and highlight how marketing strategies needs to be re-designed for success in the BOP markets. The book will be published by Emerald in late 2018.

I am included below the ‘Call for Chapters’ for your information. I would welcome any topic/s on emerging issues in BOP marketing particularly those that match your current area/s of research expertise.

I hope you would be able to submit a chapter proposal for my book. The deadline for submitting a chapter proposal is December 31, 2016. Would you please let me know if you are interested in submitting a chapter proposal?

Many thanks and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,

Ramendra Singh
Associate Professor(Marketing)
IIM Calcutta; Joka, Diamond Harbour Road
Kolkata 700104. India
Ph:91-33-24678301-06(Ext 737); Mobile-91-9883599998
Webpage- http://facultylive.iimcal.ac.in/users/ramendra

 

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Call for Chapters: Bottom of the Pyramid Marketing: Making, Shaping and Developing BOP Markets

Editor

Prof Ramendra Singh (Email: ramendra@iimcal.ac.in).

Important Dates

• Proposals Submission Deadline: December 31, 2016
• Intimation of accepted chapter proposals: February 01, 2017
• Submission of Full Chapters Due: June 30, 2017
• Final Submission Date after revisions: November 30, 2017

Introduction

The domain of BOP markets, and conducting business at BOP was highly popularized in the book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid Eradicating poverty through profits” authored by Late Prof C.K. Prahalad in 2005. This book not only popularized the term and brought the BOP domain in the focus of attention for marketing scholars as well as practitioners, but also led to further development of the field. Not only the scholarly work on BOP increased in volume, but the field also developed by more books being written from perspectives varying from business perspective, to critiques of approaches to doing BOP business. Soon after Prahalad’s book became popular, another noted BOP scholar Madhubalan Viswanathan, along with his cohort of scholars (S. Gajendiran, and R. Venkatesan) published a book titled, “Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces,” in 2008 that focused on marketplace literacy and subsistence entrepreneurship. In contrast to Prahalad’s approach of doing BOP business using top-down approach (from NCs to BOP consumer), Vishwanathan et al proposed a bottoms-up approach which motivated stakeholders to develop marketplace literacy at BOP to encourage entrepreneurship at subsistence economies (they avoided the term BOP). In 2008 itself Stuart Hart, along with Erik Simanis and Duncan Duke published a book titled,” The base of the pyramid protocol: Beyond “basic needs” business strategies”. As evident, the book focused on developing strategic norms for conducting best business practices at BOP. Soon after this, two more books came out in 2011 that also focused on poor consumers. One was titled, ”Poor Economics” authored by Abhijit Banerjee, and Esther Duflo who based their philosophy of understanding poor consumers based on series of experiments they had conducted all over the world based out of Poverty lab in MIT. Another book titled, “ Fighting Poverty Together: Rethinking Strategies for Business, Governments, and Civil Society to Reduce Poverty” authored by Aneel Karnani discussed how MNC firms tend to exploit poor when they market their products and services to them as consumers. Instead, the book argued, the poor should be developed through more employments where stakeholders such as civil society, governments and Business play a more humanitarian and less-profit oriented approach. In the same year, one more book titled, “ Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs, “ was published by Muhammad Yunus which extolled the virtues of doing social businesses which achieved the dual objectives of serving the social objectives such as doing good at BOP, together with the profit objectives that businesses aim for. Soon after that in 2013, Madhubalan Vishwanathan brought out an eBook on ‘Subsistence marketplace’, followed by another eBook titled, “Bottom-up enterprise: Insights from Subsistence Marketplaces”. Both these books highlighted the merits of developing entrepreneurship at BOP, using bottoms-up approach. Another scholar Ted London, who also was a contemporary of C.K. Prahalad, published two books. One was published in 2011, titled,” Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid: New Approaches for Building Mutual Value,” and the other was published in 2016, titled”. The Base of the Pyramid Promise: Building Businesses with Impact and Scale”. Ted’s books have taken the field of BOP baseline to the next level, along with those of the others as discussed above.

Given the body of knowledge developed thus in the domain of BOP, focus has been more on development and implementation of business strategies, and except for academic research, there are very few books on BOP marketing. Hence there is a need for a new book that focusses on BOP marketing strategies rather than only on BOP business strategies. Hence the positioning this book would be more specific and advanced to be able to meet the next level of challenges in BOP marketing- specifically catering to the economic, social, and political practices in making, shaping and developing BOP markets. This focus would be unique to the book which has hitherto not been covered in books before. It is an area that BOP scholars are also grappling with, and therefore the timing of the book is quite opportune.

Objectives

The authors can aim to situate their book chapter/s in any one or more of the following suggested themes of the proposed book:
Part-I: Making of BOP Markets & Marketing at BOP: Where we are and what we know?

• What are the new challenges in BOP markets?
• How is BOP marketing different from developed markets?
• Challenges with developing markets at BOP
• Classification of BOP markets
• What do we know of local and informal markets?
• What do we know of illegal markets?
• Cross cultural differences in BOP marketing [how does geography/culture influence BOP strategy of firms]
• BOP marketing and food security [business domain specific issues of substantive interest]
• Interaction between BOP marketing and public policy

Part-II: Shaping Future BOP markets?

• Future of BOP markets, especially local markets, and other forms of informal markets
• Where should research on BOP markets, and marketing move?
• Exploring informal and local markets such as Bazaars in India

Part-III: Developing BOP Markets: Opportunities and Challenges for Marketers

• Issues and challenges for marketing to and for BOP?
• Designing specific solutions for the BOP marketing challenges
• Implementation issues in BOP marketing solutions
• The dark side of BOP marketing

Target Audience

Management practitioners: Managers, social entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations who are looking to ‘do well’ for profit sake or non-profit purposes would be an important audience.

Academics: Those teaching, doing research, or using research for policy advocacy should find this book a mandatory or recommended reading in courses such Marketing to Bottom of Pyramid, Social Entrepreneurship, Inclusive businesses, and so on.

Consultants: Those in the space of management consulting or advisory services can enhance current practice to facilitate the best practices and leverage knowledge in their implementation.

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit by December 31, 2016, a book chapter proposal of 1,000-1500 words to: ramendra@iimcal.ac.in. The chapter proposal must clearly explain the objectives, positioning, method, and intended contributions to knowledge and/or practice at BOP. All authors will be notified by email of the editorial decision on the proposal by February 01, 2017, along with chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by June 30, 2017. All full chapter/s should also be emailed to: ramendra@iimcal.ac.in.

After the revisions are done, final submissions are due-November 30, 2017. All interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions prior to submission. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for other chapters. All manuscripts would be accepted based on a double-blind peer review editorial process.

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