Marketing Mix Strategies towards the Bottom of the Pyramid: a study of the Brazilian market
Prahalad has started a debate in the last decade regarding the opportunities of doing businesstowards the low-income consumers of emerging markets, which he called Bottom of the Pyramid(BOP) markets. The purpose of this study is to investigate how companies adapt their marketingmix strategies in order to target this type of market. The research is developed as case studieswithin the Brazilian telecom market in order to offer a new BOP setting as previous research hasbeen focusing on Asia and Africa. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews are conducted withmanagers of the prepaid segment of three telecom companies. The study shows that pricestrategies are most important to adapt towards affordability in order to target BOP marketsbecause of consumers’ limited budget. While adaptation in product and place are also seen, theyare not as substantial as in price. The strategy that was not adapted was promotion as traditionalchannels are most common within the Brazilian BOP market. Moreover, companies with astrategy that traditionally have been upper-segment-centric do have to make larger and moreinnovative adaptations in order to market this segment.