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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
VII. Special Topics and
Perspectives
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 20-1
20. International
Advertising and Promotion
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
Marketing to 4 Billion of the World’s Poorest Consumers
Most multinational companies generate the majority
of their sales and profits by selling products and services
to consumers and businesses in highly developed
countries. When they do venture into developing
nations such as India or China, they have traditionally
focused on urban areas where incomes are higher and
communication, transportation, and distribution systems
are available to implement their marketing programs.
However, many multinational marketers have
begun turning their attention to the 4 billion consumers
who live in the remote, rural communities of
developing countries. These people are yearning for a
better way of life and are eager to become consumers
for a variety of products.
While this emergent trend has been given various
labels such as B2-4B (business-to-4-billion) selling, selling
to the “bottom of the pyramid,” or selling to premarkets,
a number of companies are recognizing that
they can turn a profit while having a positive effect on
people not normally considered potential consumers.
However, they also realize that it is a tremendous challenge
to market to these consumers. Many of the
world’s poor live in severe poverty, subsisting on less
than $1,500 a year, and are illiterate or nearly so. They
often live in tiny villages in remote areas that are completely
beyond the reach of mass media and common
distribution channels. Their access to and ability to
use products are determined by the available infrastructure—water,
roads, electricity—or lack thereof.
Clearly marketers have to package, price, and distribute
their products differently as well as find innovative
ways to communicate with these consumers.
So how do global marketers such as Procter & Gamble
and Unilever sell soap to consumers who use mud
to bathe, or how do they market toothpaste to someone
who uses wood from a tree to clean his teeth?
These companies often start by examining the daily
lives of the consumers, including their needs, aspirations,
and habits, to better understand what they may
want as consumers. In many cases, advertising agencies
are following or often leading their clients into
these rural areas. For example, the Interpublic Group’s
Lowe Lintas & Partners recently set up “Linterland,” an
extension of its integrated marketing communications
department, to help clients such as Unilever market
to hard-to-reach consumers in Indonesia. Lowe’s
director of IMC estimates that about 64 percent of
Indonesia’s population (about 135 million people) lives
in rural areas but can afford relatively inexpensive consumer
goods such as soft drinks, shampoo, and toothpaste.
The director of Linterland Indonesia notes that
conventional media are not capable of reaching these
rural consumers and so a different form of marketing
communications—one that relies on events, road
shows, and sampling—is needed to reach them.
Other ad agencies have set up similar operations to
reach the vast rural populations in other Asian countries.
For example, in India, 75 percent of the population
(700 million people) is spread out in 600,000
villages that are virtually untouched by mass media,
and they speak more than 360 dialects. WPP Group’s
Ogilvy and Mather launched its own special unit,
Ogilvy Outreach, consisting of 35 teams in four offices
that coordinate rural marketing activities across 14
states, using a network of 15,000 field-workers. Ogilvy
Outreach has resorted to unusual practices such as
painting cows’ horns, branding water sources, organizing
folk performances, and relying on schoolteachers,
village heads and local health workers to relay marketing
messages for clients such as Hinustan Lever,
Castrol, or Amara Raja batteries. McCann-Erickson
Worldwide has developed Group Asia, which specializes
in rural event marketing to help its clients reach
consumers in remote areas.
The most challenging country for marketers looking
beyond urban markets is China, which has nearly
900 million rural consumers who are almost completely
untouched by multinational marketers. In addition
to the lack of knowledge regarding brands, there
are problems of low income and very poor infrastructures.
However, many companies are branching out
into these rural areas. Word-of-mouth is the supreme
marketing tool for reaching consumers in these markets,
followed by education and product demonstrations.
Marketers also have to adapt their products for
these markets by making them available in single-use
sachets that cost the equivalent of pennies rather than
dollars and can be easily distributed and sold through
the small kiosks found in rural villages.
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