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Addressing grand challenges through the bottom-up marketing approach: Lessons from subsistence marketplaces and marketplace literacy

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We present a bottom-up marketing approach as a pathway to addressing the grand challenge of poverty and inequality for the marketing discipline. We derive this approach from the research stream on radically different contexts of subsistence marketplaces. Research on subsistence marketplaces has typically explored micro-level phenomena but also traversed upward and explained aggregate phenomena at higher levels. We present a conceptual framework to encapsulate general and granular elements of the bottom-up marketing approach. Study 1 demonstrates general elements of the framework through a retrospective examination of the global diffusion of a marketplace literacy program. Study 2 demonstrates the more granular elements of the framework through a qualitative analysis of five case studies of social enterprise start-ups. Though presenting a complementary counter-perspective to conventional thinking, we embed the process of interweaving the bottom-up with the macro level to present an actionable approach. We conclude with insights for marketing research and practice.
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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01022-z
ORIGINAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Addressing grand challenges throughthebottom‑up marketing
approach: Lessons fromsubsistence marketplaces andmarketplace
literacy
MadhuViswanathan1· ArunSreekumar2· SrinivasSridharan3· GauravR.Sinha4
Accepted: 15 March 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
We present a bottom-up marketing approach as a pathway to addressing the grand challenge of poverty and inequality
for the marketing discipline. We derive this approach from the research stream on radically different contexts of subsist-
ence marketplaces. Research on subsistence marketplaces has typically explored micro-level phenomena but also traversed
upward and explained aggregate phenomena at higher levels. We present a conceptual framework to encapsulate general and
granular elements of the bottom-up marketing approach. Study 1 demonstrates general elements of the framework through a
retrospective examination of the global diffusion of a marketplace literacy program. Study 2 demonstrates the more granular
elements of the framework through a qualitative analysis of five case studies of social enterprise start-ups. Though presenting
a complementary counter-perspective to conventional thinking, we embed the process of interweaving the bottom-up with
the macro level to present an actionable approach. We conclude with insights for marketing research and practice.
Keywords Subsistence marketplaces· Marketplace literacy· Bottom-up marketing approach
Globally, more than two billion people live in subsistence
marketplaces (Viswanathan & Rosa, 2007) and face grave
challenges of low incomes and personal resources, coupled
with inadequate access to basic goods and services such
as food, water, housing, education, financial services, and
health care (Hosany & Hamilton, 2023). Marketplaces in
these contexts operate at a confluence of uncertainties that
emerge from the lack of resources (Viswanathan, 2016).
Moreover, consumers in such marketing contexts are con-
strained not only materially and financially but also cogni-
tively and emotionally (Viswanathan, 2013). These uncer-
tainties arise from extreme material constraints, cognitive
and affective challenges in choosing optimal products and
services (Viswanathan etal., 2005), and lack of access to
marketplaces (Viswanathan etal., 2021). At the market-
place level, these uncertainties emerge from such factors
as inadequate infrastructure (Sheth, 2011), and inefficient
buyer–seller exchanges (Viswanathan etal., 2010). In con-
trast with relatively resource-rich markets conventionally
studied by marketing scholars, subsistence marketplaces
face a scale and scope of inequities that make the problem
of addressing consumption problems seemingly intractable,
thereby posing a “grand challenge” to the field of marketing.
As such, recent studies have called for scholars to reim-
agine marketing theory and present forward-looking intel-
lectual frameworks that help elevate the scope and focus
of marketing to a higher ground (Mick, 2007) and orient
the discipline toward greater responsibility and inclusivity
Madhu Viswanathan, Arun Sreekumar, Srinivas Sridharan, and
Gaurav R. Sinha contributed equally to this work.
Dhruv Grewal served as Guest Editor for this article.
* Madhu Viswanathan
marketplaceliteracy@gmail.com
Arun Sreekumar
arun.sreekumar2@gmail.com
Srinivas Sridharan
Srinivas.sridharan@monash.edu
Gaurav R. Sinha
grsinha@uga.edu
1 Loyola Marymount University, Emeritus - University
ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
2 Indian Institute ofManagement, Ahmedabad, India
3 Monash University, Clayton, Australia
4 University ofGeorgia, Athens, GA, USA
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
(de Ruyter etal., 2022) and toward building a better world
(Chandy etal., 2021). Literature in marketing has addressed
societal challenges broadly in research on public policy,
macro marketing, social marketing, marketing ethics, and
international consumer policy (Wilkie & Moore, 2003).
However, we argue that the literature as well as practice
largely reflects a top-down orientation to marketing, from
the perspective of the marketing organization. Though advo-
cating an outward-looking orientation and customer cen-
tricity, the most heavily cited marketing ideas (e.g., market
orientation, SERVQUAL, service–dominant logic, seg-
mentation) have generally been implemented within firms
with a top-down marketing orientation. Furthermore, such
a theoretical development has predominantly emerged from
a US-centric perspective (Wilkie & Moore, 2003, p. 139),
whereas grand challenges are quintessentially global—for
example, the COVID-19 pandemic affected every country
in the world. Therefore, to develop an equitable marketing
system that serves all segments of society, reduces inequal-
ity, eliminates poverty, and enhances well-being (Wilkie &
Moore, 2003), the discipline must seek alternatives to the
top-down and US-centric perspectives.
In the past, marketing scholarship has adopted a vari-
ety of firm- and consumer-driven approaches to tackle the
grand challenge of inequitable consumption in subsistence
marketplaces. For example, the stream of literature on base-
of-the-pyramid marketing (Prahalad, 2005) recommends that
firms take into account the unique circumstances of low-
income consumers to develop innovative but affordable solu-
tions for them, thereby improving profits for firms through
the sheer volume of sales. Exemplars include research on
cost-saving innovations (Williamson, 2010), re-engineered
products (Hart & Christensen, 2002), and frugal innovations
(Radjou & Prabhu, 2014). Social marketing employs tar-
geted behavioral interventions to overcome specific prob-
lems identified as critical (Lefebvre, 2011). More recently,
large-scale randomized controlled trials have assessed the
behavioral outcomes of targeted interventions addressing
those problems (Madan etal., 2023). Transformative con-
sumer research has highlighted the importance of consumer
well-being. For example, Hill (1991) provides a detailed
and compelling ethnographic account of how low-income
consumers cope with extreme marketplace exclusion and
consumption inadequacy.
We argue that firm-centric (i.e., top-down) approaches
do not address the challenges that subsistence consumers
face. They do not adequately address the multitude of social,
institutional, cognitive, and behavioral factors that lead to
consumption constraints (Woolcock & Narayan, 2000).
In other words, they do not capture a bottom-up orienta-
tion. The solutions emerging from such reductionist think-
ing, such as increasing calorie consumption (Deaton &
Dreze, 2009), do not address the inequities in subsistence
marketplaces in significant ways. Conversely, purely con-
sumer-centric approaches intended to enhance consumer
well-being may underemphasize the strategic priorities of
the firm. Furthermore, they are not sufficiently bottom-up
and are often viewed from the vantage point of a top-down
organizational lens.
We present a bottom-up marketing approach as an effec-
tive path forward for marketing research and practice to
address the grand challenge of inequality and poverty. In its
simplest form, such an approach means beginning with roots
at the micro level of ground realities and then traversing
upward to develop insights about product development, mar-
keting strategies, business models, and broader sustainable
development. By contrast, the top-down approach begins
with where an organization is, is framed around what the
organization already knows, and is constrained by what the
organization desires to achieve. In our view, despite espous-
ing consumer centricity as a fulcrum, the marketing disci-
pline remains embedded in an organizational perspective of
markets; that is, the emphasis is top-down even if the intent
is bottom-up. In this study, we articulate a counter-perspec-
tive but also show how firms can iteratively interweave the
macro level; in other words, we challenge conventional wis-
dom but also offer actionable implications.
This approach emerges from prior work on subsistence
marketplaces and is rooted in first understanding those
contexts as pre-existing marketplaces, recognizing factors
such as the “duality” of individuals being both consumers
and entrepreneurs simultaneously (Viswanathan & Rosa,
2007; Viswanathan etal., 2010). This stream of research
recognizes that marketplaces in subsistence contexts are
embedded in social and cultural exchanges in the commu-
nity and cannot be studied atomistically and exclusively as
arenas for exchanging products and services (Viswanathan
etal., 2012). Subsistence contexts are highly unfamiliar
and complex for managers to unpack with pre-conceived
assumptions developed from their experiences with devel-
oped markets. At the same time, purely consumer-driven
approaches may be limited by the extreme cognitive and
affective constraints faced by subsistence consumers arising
from multiple resource scarcities. Therefore, a bottom-up
approach is necessary for developing solutions. In this study,
we show how the approach that evolved in radically distinct
contexts and that characterizes the stream of work on sub-
sistence marketplaces is relevant for all contexts. Adopting
this counter-perspective to pervasive top-down approaches,
we propose interweaving the bottom-up approach with the
macro level.
We begin by reviewing the stream of subsistence
marketplaces. We thendevelopa conceptual framework
encompassing general and granular elements of the bot-
tom-up marketing approach. Study 1 employs a retrospec-
tive examination of the global diffusion of a marketplace
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
literacy program todemonstrategeneral elements of the
framework . Study 2 employsa qualitative analysis of five
case studies of social enterprise start-ups to demonstratethe
more granular elements of the framework.Next, we develop
prescriptive recommendations on how traditional market-
ing approaches should be reimagined for subsistence mar-
ketplaces. We do so through a longitudinal study of the
evolution of five social enterprises in India. In this way, we
demonstrate how the counter-perspective we develop can
be interwoven in actionable ways for marketing. In the next
section, we review the literature from the stream of subsist-
ence marketplaces.
Subsistence marketplaces
Overview
The evolution of subsistence marketplace scholarship
represents a journey over more than two and a half dec-
ades(Viswanathan, 2013; Viswanathan & Rosa, 2007; see
summary in Web Appendix, TableW1 and Fig.W1). The
term “subsistence” refers to a broad range of low-income
contexts, from extreme poverty at one end to lower-middle
income at the other end. The term “marketplace” emphasizes
the need to understand pre-existing exchange practices and is
distinct from the term “markets,” which can lead to a mindset
of searching for new sales territories for existing products.
Subsistence marketplaces are at a confluence of uncertain-
ties, such as in day-to-day life and in being vulnerable to a
variety of calamities. Studying such contexts means starting
from a vantage point of a confluence of unfamiliarities as
marketing researchers, educators, and practitioners. Moreo-
ver, each subsistence context is distinct as a function of local
culture, social hierarchies, political stability, and different
manifestations of extreme resource constraints. These char-
acteristics necessitate a bottom-up orientation to subsistence
marketplaces. Uncertainty and distinctiveness are inherent
in subsistence contexts, as is unfamiliarity from the outside.
Overall, from this scholarship, a vivid portrait emerges
of individuals who are materially poor, with cognitive and
emotional constraints due to their low literacy, but have
the potential for socially rich relationships in one-to-one
interactional settings.Low-literate individuals have dif-
ficulties with abstractions leading to concrete thinking
using single or a few pieces of information (Viswana-
than etal., 2005). They face difficulties in comprehend-
ing concepts such as customers or enterprises that are
richly formed for others with education and exposure.
They display a dependence on sensory modes, such as
pictographic thinking, visualizing, picturing brand names
or amounts to buy, or picturing currency bills as ways to
“compute.” The role of self-esteem and self-confidence
even in mundane shopping interactions is central, as peo-
ple fear loss of face from being exposed for their lack of
literacy and/or income. Consumers engage in several cop-
ing behaviors to manage their stress, such as developing
rudimentary heuristics or avoiding consumption situations
altogether.
The literature has described a marketplace of highly
personal one-on-one interactions in which fluid, respon-
sive,and customized exchanges unfold. One-on-one mar-
keting relationships may be enduring and infused with
empathy, occurring within the broader context of extreme
interdependence and a prevalence of oral–visual commu-
nications (Viswanathan etal., 2012). A key characteristic
is “consumer-entrepreneur duality,” in which individuals
play the dual roles of buyer and seller, exemplified by the
term “subsistence consumer merchants” (Viswanathan
etal., 2010). Whereas prior research has examined par-
tial notions of duality, such as “prosumers” or consum-
ers involved in co-creation or do-it-yourself production
processes (Humphreys & Grayson, 2008), thesubsistence
marketplaces literature underscores a seamless naviga-
tion of both sides of the buyer–seller relationship. Actors
within this context exhibit a capacity to empathize with the
alternate role, as they frequently share common adversities
(Viswanathan etal., 2010). Notably, subsistence consumer
merchants operate in marketplaces that blur with social
communities, with strong familial and neighborhood ties.
Individuals enact dual roles through one-to-one interac-
tions, despite substantial cognitive, emotional, and behav-
ioral constraints.
This research stream has demonstrated the viability of
a bottom-up product development process (Viswanathan,
2016; Viswanathan etal., 2012), with such iterative stages
asbottom-upimmersion (in day-to-day realities), emer-
sion (of new insights), design, innovation, and enterprise.
This specialized product development process focuses on
life aspirations and community circumstances beyond just
the concrete product need. Elsewhere, research has also
highlighted marketing practices initiated from the bot-
tom up, such as in stitching together segments, collect-
ing samples for market research, and building distribution
pathways (Viswanathan, 2013, 2016). The research stream
itself has moved bottom-up, beginning at the micro level
of consumer and entrepreneur lives and developing
aggregated insights on product development, marketing
models, and sustainable development. This stream dem-
onstrates the blurring of products and life circumstances,
the social and theeconomic, and the market and social
milieu (Viswanathan etal., 2009). In business model par-
lance, a parallel blurring between doing good and doing
well has also been highlighted.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
From a consumer perspective, by focusing on deeper
layers of consumer behavior, such as survival fears and
aspirational hopes, subsistence marketplaces scholarship
has helped shift the frame of marketing from serving con-
sumer needs and wants to fostering consumer survival
and thriving. This shift in focus enhances the potential
of the marketing discipline to meaningfully address the
grand challenge of poverty. The stream bridges marketing
theory and its unique vantage point about customers and
development through its emphasis on beneficiaries. In sum-
mary, the subsistence marketplace stream has attempted
to traverse all three domains of marketing highlighted by
Achrol and Kotler (2012)—namely, its sub-phenomena
(underlying human issues such as consumer behavior), phe-
nomena (marketing firms and their operations), and super-
phenomena (larger societal issues such as sustainability
and development)—with a foundational starting point,
a micro customer–entrepreneur marketplace level, and a
bottom-up orientation. Furthermore, a social enterprise to
impart marketplace literacy education evolved in parallel
with the subsistence marketplaces research stream, which
is described subsequently (see summary in Web Appendix,
Fig.W1).1
Bottom‑up framework
Drawing from the research described previously, we
introduce a comprehensive bottom-up framework for the
marketing discipline to address the grand challenge of
poverty. The framework covers the underlying principles
(the “why”), the approach and strategies (the “how”), and
the components (the “what”) of a bottom-up approach
to expanding marketing to solve grand challenges. We
contrast the framework against the status-quo marketing
approach, which we argue is implicitly top-down, with
firms routinely focused on their existing knowledge base.
A key aspect of our proposed bottom-up framework is the
notion of contextual re-grounding. We envision this as a
counterpoint to the conventional notion of scaling up and
expansion of a successful marketing activity. Conven-
tional expansion is driven by diversification and new profit
opportunities and therefore involves a top-down transfer of
“proven best practices.” By contrast, the bottom-up mar-
keting approach proposes a re-grounding in each new con-
text—that is, evolving the marketing activity interdepend-
ently with and rooted in local populations, priorities, and
resources. For example, an organization could be guided
by a top-down vision, yet continually create distinct pur-
poses grounded in the distinct user contexts in which it
functions. Its style of evolution and growth could remain
the same across user contexts, while the diffusion of its
market offerings could vary substantially in each context.
It could also operate a common baseline innovation plat-
form but allow insights in each context to help adapt the
specific innovation to that context, while also enriching the
baseline. All these facets extend the marketing philosophy
of understanding customers and its outward orientation to
its logical fullest sense.
The why Solving grand challenges requires a grand vision
of social change. In user contexts with grand challenges
that are filled with much uncertainty and rapid change in
ground realities, the principles of a marketing approach (the
why) must be proactively evolved. This bottom-up approach
evolved in subsistence marketplaces characterized by con-
fluences of uncertainties and of unfamiliarities among mar-
keting researchers, educators, and practitioners. However,
it is applicable to grand challenges, and certainly those of
poverty and inequality, that share similar characteristics. The
complex set of variables and their interplay in ground reality
in distinctively different contexts necessitates the bottom-up
approach.
For example, when expanding the organization’s work
from one context to many, such overarching vision will
need to be shared across the contexts. A common vision
based not only on the “customer” but also on the com-
munity and larger context can then be reconfigured. This
is akin to an organization with a broad vision for change
serving an important need, reflecting a marketing phi-
losophy. In turn, the larger purpose or mission needs to
not just be customized but insteadreconfigured on the
basis of bottom-up understanding of consumer, commu-
nity, and context. In a sense, this is diametrically opposite
thecustomization of predetermined solutions. It is also
distinct from the classic work on marketing myopia, given
an explicit phase of reconfiguring purpose based on the
bottom-up.
We use notions of convergence (“moving toward uniform-
ity”; merriam-webster.com) and divergence (“mov[ing] or
extend[ing] in different directions from a common point”;
merriam-webster.com) to articulate our approach. If a grand
challenge such as poverty has universal elements, marketing
solutions must be based on a broad vision for change that is
also universal. This connotation of convergence is consist-
ent with the marketing philosophy that in any context, the
serving of user needs is central. Yet, at the same time, the
specific social purpose or the organization’s mission needs
iterative reconfiguration as it builds across market contexts.
This must involve being attentive to ground realities not only
of the organization’s “customers” but also of the broader
community at large and contextual realities. This connota-
tion of divergence is not inconsistent with marketing theory
1 This stream has also led to education on subsistence marketplaces,
which is outside the scope of this article.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
but is not captured by existing constructs such as customiza-
tion, which essentially begins with predetermined options.
We use these terms as they allow flexibility and reflect a
process rather than an outcome.
The how Iterative convergence–divergencealso applies
to the “how” (i.e., the organization’s marketing strategies,
structures, tactics, and operations). For example, the princi-
ple of organic rather than acquisitive growth is critical for a
social change organization and thus must become a conver-
gent commonality as the organization expands across geog-
raphies or other demarcations. Yet the actual implementation
of strategies and tactics must be grounded and respond to
the distinctive characteristics of each new market. This turns
on its head not only the notion of scaling up but also other
traditional top-down notions such as segmentation, pricing,
distribution, and communication. Crowd-sourcing and brand
communities are two notions that have emerged in the social
media era that are consistent with the bottom-up marketing
approach, but the unique multi-headed nature of grand chal-
lenges requires a complete reversal of top-down thinking.
The what Finally, the “what” pertains to the offerings—the
goods or services, products, or processes—that provide value
to the marketplaces. In this context, the convergent element
entails maintaining a foundational baseline offering, while
the divergent aspect involves re-creating specific offerings
that are shaped by and, in turn, further refine the foundational
baseline. The conventional alternative would be a standard
product with customizable modules. But in a bottom-up mar-
keting approach, we propose iteratively evolving the conver-
gent and divergent elements organically and gradually. We
demonstrate the part of the framework articulated so far in a
study on the social enterprise of marketplace literacy.
Study 1: The why, how, andwhat
ofthebottom‑up marketing approach
Method
Research context We undertake an in-depth investigation
of a single case study (Eisenhardt, 1989) of the Marketplace
Literacy Project (MLP). MLP has implemented marketplace
literacy education in seven countries (India, United States,
Uganda, Tanzania, Argentina, Honduras, and Mexico) and
reached more than 100,000 individuals, almost all women,
until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. MLP was
formed as a non-profit organization in the United States in
2003. The focus on marketplace literacy emerged from the
subsistence marketplaces research program, and insights
about the cognitive and emotional constraints faced by
low-literate,low-income consumers. Marketplace literacy
encompasses knowledge and skills at three distinct levels of
abstraction: vocational skills (knowing what to buy or sell),
process knowledge (know-how to function as a customer or
entrepreneur), and causal understanding (the know–why of
the functioning as a customer or an entrepreneur or ofthe
broader marketplace) (Viswanathan etal., 2009). The edu-
cational program was developed with a specific focus on the
know–why level, so that participants could overcome their
cognitive and emotionalconstraints and thrive in the mar-
ketplace. For aspiring entrepreneurs, marketplace literacy
would help unpack the core consumer need their enterprises
would serve (i.e., the “why”). Consequently, marketplace
literacy is distinct from traditional programs that focus on
aspects such as livelihood training (the “what”) or how to
keep accounts or promote a product (the “how”). Content
development and delivery was bottom-up, by concretiz-
ing, localizing (having contextual relevance), and socializ-
ing the material (building on the relational richness of the
marketplace/community).
As a social enterprise creating and offering a social inno-
vation in seven countries, MLP serves as a useful setting
to observe and derive insights into the practical manifesta-
tion of a bottom-up marketing approach. One of the authors
pioneered the development of the program, enabling access
to rich insights into its origins and overarching goals, and
strengthening the reflexive approach of the research (Sherry,
2007). Two other authors also spent several weeks in three
of the seven countries immersing themselves in MLP’s
activities. During these immersion visits, they developed
detailed field notes and participated in marketplace literacy
educational sessions to observe the delivery of marketplace
literacy in the field.
Data collection Aside from organically gaining insights, we
collected qualitative data. Two of the authors not connected
with MLP interviewed a cross-section of respondents from
the seven country organizations, recorded the interviews,
and developed notes independently, without the involve-
ment of the founder-author. Our interviewees represented
champions, facilitators, and beneficiaries actively involved
in marketplace literacy in different geographies who have
experienced our phenomenon of interest (i.e., the global
expansion of the program) (for the sample, see TableW2 in
the Web Appendix). Aside from some guiding questions, the
interviews were open-ended; we went along with the flow
of the conversation rather than having a strict sequence of
questions, to understand the most pertinent issues for the
interviewee. Each interview lasted 30min to three hours,
and we conducted approximately 19hours of interviews for
the study. Interviews took place in two phases. In the first
phase, we interviewed 16 people from India, the United
States, Uganda, Tanzania, Argentina, Honduras, and Mexico
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
(Web Appendix; TableW2). In the second phase, we inter-
viewed eight people from Tanzania, Honduras, and Mexico.
Thus, in total, we interviewed 24 people in this study. Inter-
views continued until theoretical saturation was reached. We
contacted the informants beforehand by email, sharing the
purpose of the interview and scheduling it at a convenient
time for them. We arranged for translators when required.
In most cases, the champions facilitated the interactions and
translated the conversation, except in India, where one of
the two authors conducting interviews was conversant in
the local language.
Data analysis We used a grounded theory approach to
code and analyze the interview data. The analysis strategy
was two-pronged. At a higher level, we focused on under-
standing the nature and structure of the program across
the countries. At an operational level, we aimed to unpack
the locally interpreted marketing nuances of the program
in each country. We followed recommended step-by-step
procedures. First, we generated initial codes as interpreta-
tions of the data, including comparing field notes with the
recorded conversations. Next, multiple repeated readings of
the data yielded some data reduction by grouping similar
codes and some data refinement by recoding some codes into
more conceptually nuanced themes. Through this iterative
and interpretive process, we learned how the global diffu-
sion of MLP unfolded in a dual pathway, represented by the
themes of “convergence” and “divergence.” Convergence
connotes isomorphism and similarity, whereas divergence
implies dissimilarity, diversity, and discontinuity (DiMaggio
& Powell, 1991).
Findings
We organize our findings along three key logics of the dif-
fusion of marketplace literacy: the motivations (why), the
processes (how), and the substantive elements that were dif-
fused (what). We outline the twin themes of convergence and
divergence in each of the three logics, with specific titles
that capture the essence. Throughout this discussion, we
highlight insights that allow inferring a bottom-up logic to
the diffusion of this social innovation across specific con-
textual circumstances (Fig.1).
Convergence versusdivergence inthe“why”
ofdiffusion
Convergence: Vision for change The founder-author’s belief
that deep understanding of and participation in the market-
placecan enable low-literate, low-income individuals to
empower and uplift themselves economically and socially
led to the marketplace literacy program. This vision of
(social) change became crystallized from insights gleaned
from the subsistence research program that low literacy
causes chronic difficulty in abstract thinking (Viswanathan
etal., 2005). It helped focus the MLP program on an under-
standing of marketplaces rather than exclusively on building
vocational marketplace skills. The vision was shared by the
champions of the programs in all seven countries and thus
became a feature of how the marketplace literacy initiative
diffused globally. Such modeling did not occur as a deliber-
ate decision at a single point in time, but rather on a continu-
ous basis and also often intuitively or organically.
Program managers in the United States, Honduras, and
Mexico reiterated this theme in different ways (for a fuller
listing of quotes, see Web Appendix, TableW3). The team
leader in Argentina (Sofia) described the (social) vision of
the MLP as “help[ing] subsistence consumers overcome
their fears and limitation in buying what they want to buy.
When they know what they want and its value in a market
setting, they feel in better control of their lives.” Sofia
went on to say, “It’s [the] same for such [subsistence] sell-
ers. When they know what business to start and how to
do it, they immediately feel like they are now in control
of their fate.” In Uganda, where the primary beneficiaries
of the program were inhabitants of a large refugee set-
tlement, the MLP vision acquired a specific way of mak-
ing refugees socially independent and economically self-
sufficient. In summary, the vision for (social) change to
empower individuals by imparting deep understanding of
Fig. 1 General elements of
framework
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
and agency in markets led to convergent elements across
countries. It also fostered commonality in methodology,
in which lived experiences of participants served as plat-
forms from which to cascade up to abstract concepts such
as value.
Divergence: Reconfigured purpose across geogra
phies Whereas the vision of (social) change was convergent,
the specific social purpose of MLP took on dissimilar and
diverse meanings, based on the different realities of social
and economic conditions of the beneficiary community in
each country. The immediate social outcome of the program
needed to be consistent with the local entity’s scope. This,
in turn, was designed to respond to the life circumstances of
the customer/beneficiary and community. In addition, the
organizational structure, local functions of the field team or
partner organization, and the resources available for imple-
menting the program all differed across different countries.
Therefore, the social purpose of the program became diver-
gent and driven by the unique insights gathered by field
teams embedded in each community.
In Mexico, a field team implemented marketplace literacy
for girls and women facing domestic abuse, with support
from a grant from the US State Department (Web Appendix,
TableW3, quote #6). The social purpose in this case was
to empower women to become capable of earning a living
on their own. In Tanzania, the social purpose encompassed
helping members of the Masai tribe make judicious market-
place decisions about the use of their natural resources faced
with challenges of globalization and climate change (Web
Appendix, TableW3, quote #7). An interviewee in Uganda,
who educates refugees in marketplace literacy, indirectly
described the divergence in the immediate social purpose
of MLP (Web Appendix, TableW3, quote #8).
Convergence versusdivergence inthe“how”
ofdiffusion
Convergence: Organic evolution and growth In each coun-
try, marketplace literacy grew organically by enlisting field
teams and partner organizations that shared the social vision
of “Why MLP” and were deeply connected with their com-
munities (Web Appendix, TableW3, quote #9).
I do not need to report to anyone about MLP. But,
we have set our own priorities and goals. At the
same time, I am sure that all MLP leaders in dif-
ferent countries have this independence in deciding
what to do and how to do it. I have given the same
amount of freedom to my field team. They belong
to the communities they work with and are the best
judge to decide what is best for their own people.
(Maria, program coordinator, Tanzania)
As the quote suggests, local champions often came from
the same subsistence settings they sought to serve. They
would therefore have the best perspective and judgment to
determine how to design, implement, and scale the program
within their community of interest. This was a foundational
belief of the MLP founder-author, who thus encouraged
an organic organizational culture in all countries. This, in
turn, ensured that the evolution and growth of marketplace
literacy in each country followed an organic rather than
structured process. Organizational culture is a set of shared
assumptions, expectations, and experiences that affects the
way people within an organization interact with one another
and with other stakeholders (Schrodt, 2002). The MLP
enterprise in each country represented an organic form of
organizational culture – a system of values and norms that
promotes extensive interaction and open communication,
encourages constant exploration and emergent strategies,
and sets in motion organic processes of flexibility and spon-
taneity (Deshpandé etal., 1993). By contrast, a mechanistic
culture achieves control, order, and stability and encourages
uniformity and predictability in pursuing goals (Quinn &
Rohrbaugh, 1983).
Several individual themes revealed facets of such organic
evolution and growth (see supporting quotes in Web Appen-
dix, TableW3). Interviews with different stakeholders sug-
gest that design, delivery, deployment, and scaling of mar-
ketplace literacy were tied to its intrinsic people-centric
nature. The nature of MLP is co-evolving in implementa-
tion and scaling, and it adapts on the basis of beneficiaries’
feedback and teams’ experiences. Snowballing is one of the
key strategies behind diffusing marketplace literacy and sus-
taining it. The marketplace literacy educational program is
sustained through its social network with other organizations
in the area in its operations and scaling. Interviewees men-
tioned that the program had encouraged people to become
intrinsically motivated to achieve more.
Adaptive organizational cultures are flexible and action-
oriented, providing autonomy to smaller units within the
organization to make decisions concerning them. Such
organizational decisions influence the organizational
structure by determining the boundaries within which
field team members or the leadership function (Martin,
2001). Clear boundaries included a primary focus on low-
income individuals, no monetary incentives to participants,
a sustained focus on the quality of change and evolution
of participants, and no political or religious influence on
the education. For example, the MLP leadership in all
countries of operation clearly specified that there would
be no payment to participants for attending sessions, except
in specific circumstances, such as lost earnings for those
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
with a demonstrable interest in learning (Web Appendix,
TableW3, quote #10).
Divergence: Grounded diffusion across geographies Mar-
ketplace literacy has diffused to different countries through
the creation of small (dedicated) field teams and partnering
with local organizations. The process of how marketplace
literacy diffused within each country took on distinct shades
depending on the specific nature of market-shaping capabili-
ties demonstrated by each country team (i.e., capabilities of
purposively influencing market-level characteristics, such
as re-designing exchange, re-configuring networks, and re-
forming institutions) (Nenonen etal., 2019). Thus, the nature
of organizations that support marketplace literacy in differ-
ent countries is diverse, as are the stakeholders with which
these organizations deal. As Ferdinand, the team leader in
Uganda, stated (Web Appendix, TableW3, quote #11):
It’s a melting pot. I work with refugees, someone else
works with vulnerable women. Then there are self-
help groups, small entrepreneurs, primitive cultures
and what not. Think of it – the diversity in our original
roles and goals is mind-boggling.
In the United States, marketplace literacy was supported
through a grant by a public university’s extension unit. In
Uganda and Tanzania, the organizations working on market-
place literacy were non-profit organizations with interests in
entrepreneurship education to refugees and nature conserva-
tion, respectively. In Argentina and Honduras, marketplace
literacy was championed by motivated field team members.
In Mexico, marketplace literacy was championed by two
women who care deeply about women’s autonomy and
financial literacy, respectively, with collaboration beginning
because of a grant from the US State Department. In India,
marketplace literacy was also offered by partner organiza-
tions with the purpose of providing marketplace literacy,
working with women individually or through self-help
groups in urban and rural settings. Diffusing marketplace
literacy has the downstream effect of shaping markets in
each context. Franco, the field coordinator of the project
in the Honduras who was motivated to initiate marketplace
literacy in his country after taking a massive open online
course on subsistence marketplaces, noted how his work is
different from how marketplace literacy is offered in other
countries (Web Appendix, TableW3, quote #2).
The same is true of the nature of stakeholder engage-
ment supporting MLP’s activities in different geographies.
For example, in India, marketplace literacy conducted by
one entity was completely funded by personal donations.
Another partner in India was a large microfinancing institu-
tion, which led to the development of video-based market-
place literacy educational modules. In Tanzania, marketplace
literacy was initially supported through a small field team
with personal donations and with funding from outreach at
a public university, followed by a large grant to the partner,
a conservation organization, made by a multilateral donor
agency. The partner was convinced that over time offering
marketplace literacy education would help forest-dwelling
communities use natural resources efficiently. In Mexico,
marketplace literacy was initially supported through a grant
from the US State Department, with funding then transition-
ing to outreach by a public university. In the United States,
funding was through a grant from a public university’s exten-
sion program, but other opportunities have emerged such
as a grant for a program for correctional facility inmates.
Dave, the team leader in the United States, explained why
understanding the local social and economic environment is
useful to garner resources (Web Appendix, TableW3, quotes
#15 and #16).
Convergence versusdivergence inthe“what”
ofdiffusion
Convergence: Baseline platform for innovation The baseline
educational platform developed in the early stages involved
gaining insights, design, delivery, deployment, scaling, and
assessment. The broad expanse in each aspect provided
a platform of options from which to begin when diffusing
across geographies: (1) extensive research using wide-ranging
methods in gaining insights and a variety of configurations
of detailed content in design; (2) a delivery continuum from
face-to-face to video-based; (3) deployment ranging from
formation of self-help groups to direct recruitment in urban
and rural settings and diffusion in urban and rural settings;
and (4) assessment of ability, self-reports, behavioral reports,
consumer savings, and enterprise start-ups and earnings. This
platform served as a baseline for achieving social innovation
and shaping marketplaces and then expanded into all countries
in a common and convergent way.
Marketplace literacy comprises four basic components,
typically offered in the following order and with a built-in
logic of a bottom-up sequence: generic marketplace literacy,
consumer literacy, entrepreneurial literacy, and sustain-
ability literacy. Each component has a series of education
modules, designed as a semi-structured program. In gen-
eral, these components and their modules follow a sequence,
guided by the bottom-up in all geographies (e.g., learning to
be a consumer before being an entrepreneur).
In some countries, such as Mexico, Isabella, one of the
field coordinators, mentioned that she felt entrepreneurial
literacy was being offered “too early in the program. It’s
a big jump from being a consumer to being an entrepre-
neur.” However, over time, she believed that the components
flowed seamlessly and should be maintained as they are.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Isabella added, “There is a structure and reason for keeping
the modules in this structure. Why change it when we have
seen proven results elsewhere?” Team members from differ-
ent geographies conveyed a similar impression (Web Appen-
dix, TableW3, quotes #20 and #21). Thus, prior insights are
pitted against bottom-up realities in determining pathways
forward, iterating here between the bottom-up and the macro
level.
MLP has key commonalities across all countries of its
operation. First, the program’s selection criteria are clearly
determined in terms of individuals with a wide range of low
income and low to moderate literacy. Second, the design of
the program developed from bottom-up experience provides
baseline elements, such as a focus on the know–why cover-
ing consumer and entrepreneurial aspects and an empha-
sis on delivery through a bottom-up mode of education.
The mode of delivery of marketplace literacy is fine-tuned
through multiple pilot tests for what best suits the specific
context. A broad set of assessment tools test the market-
place literacy of participants before and after the program in
terms of skills and knowledge, self-confidence, awareness of
rights, behavioral changes as customers and entrepreneurs,
and savings as customers and earnings as entrepreneurs. We
note, however, that such impact measurement should also
be bottom-up and evolve with contexts and time. Such a
baseline platform enables outcome and impact measurement
across countries with bottom-up re-creation, regardless of
who is facilitating or delivering the program. Alice, a field
coordinator in Tanzania, recalls the challenges associated
with adapting these assessment tools to the organizational
process of her own non-profit (Web Appendix, TableW3,
quote #21).
It was difficult initially. We are a conservation organi-
zation. Our goals are different, and we have different
metrics for evaluating the success of the program.
It was challenging to use the standards of MLP and
match our own project’s logical framework with it. It
took a lot of back and forth. But we understood that
these standards [of MLP] were time-tested and were
probably the best way to ensure that the program was
being delivered in an effective manner. Over time, we
integrated that into our own logical framework. We are
now using the same framework to evaluate the Masai
women who have taken MLP trainings.
Divergence: Re‑creating innovation across geogra
phies Some elements of marketplace literacy are re-cre-
ated (not just customized) to suit the local requirements of
the partner organization and the community being served.
Beyond thelanguage of course content, marketplace lit-
eracy education involves the use of metaphors and local-
ized examples to make the content more vivid and relatable
to local audiences. These elements are also unique to the
cultural context of the country. For example, instructors in
India explained how they tie marketplace literacy to day-
to-day operations of farming, as some of their beneficiaries
are involved in agriculture. The content may be modified or
new content added to reflect the social purpose of the partner
organization. In Tanzania, where the primary mandate of the
partner organization is environmental conservation, a mod-
ule on sustainability literacy was developed. Similarly, local
teachers in Mexico used examples from the social setting to
add elements of women empowerment to the educational
program. As Martina, an instructor in Mexico, said (Web
Appendix, TableW3, quote #22).
We have to make the content interesting for women,
many of [whom] have been beaten by their own
husbands. They are afraid to speak up. So, all our
examples are of local women who have been success-
ful, without depending on their families or spouses.
After some time, women start seeing themselves in
these examples. It makes them feel more powerful,
as if you know, they can become powerful too. It
may seem ordinary, but in that situation, it is life-
changing. It is those examples which help us achieve
such results.
The program in the United States is most distinctive in
this regard, re-created to an advanced economy and hav-
ing a detailed version of sustainability literacy, as well as
consumer literacy, in an advanced economy. Moreover, it
has been coupled with three-dimensional printing and maker
literacy as teaching tools. With the overarching social vision
of low-income beneficiaries of marketplace literacy, the pro-
gram includes a broad range of individuals based on their
social and cultural backgrounds even within each country.
The participants were determined by the partner organiza-
tions according to their region of influence, domain of inter-
est, organizational mandate, and requirements of the funding
agency (Web Appendix, TableW3, quote #26).
In the United States, Argentina, and Honduras, in addition
to the general population of adults, school-age children and
youth have been participants. In Mexico, the target benefi-
ciaries, as mentioned previously, were women or girls who
were potential or actual victims of domestic abuse. To a
great extent, this selection of beneficiaries guides the other
divergent elements of marketplace literacy in Mexico, such
as an additional emphasis on autonomy. In Tanzania, mar-
ketplace literacy aimed to reach men and women from the
Masai community. In India, the organization used a differ-
entiated strategy for beneficiary selection in rural and urban
areas, based on operational efficiency. In rural areas, the
team found reaching out to women and explaining the ben-
efits of marketplace literacy education easier. In urban areas,
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
the program was exclusively designed for female members
of self-help groups.
The mode of delivery of marketplace literacy depends
on needs of beneficiaries, scale of the literacy education,
available infrastructure, and the local technology ecosys-
tem. In India, the program diffused to different villages
and among urban communities, with a video-based mode
that required the presence of a facilitator. In Mexico, the
education stressed maximizing participation of the benefi-
ciaries, so that they feel confident speaking in a group set-
ting, with a video-based mode. In Tanzania, Argentina, and
Honduras, the presence of a teacher/facilitator familiar to
the beneficiaries was an essential component of the learning
environment. In Uganda and Tanzania, marketplace literacy
was offered through a mix of classroom sessions, simulated
shopping experience, activities, visits to marketplaces,
and slideshows on the computer (see, e.g., Web Appendix,
TableW3, quote #24).
The local technology ecosystem is also an important deter-
minant of how marketplace literacy education is offered.
Running the educational program in a classroom-like set-
ting requires a blackboard, an enclosed room, and seating
arrangements. However, in remote villages in Tanzania, for
example, such an arrangement was difficult and less suitable,
as the education was often more conversational and in an
outdoor setting. Meeting underneath trees was sometimes
the alternative used, though extreme heat was an obstacle.
In turn, meeting in the evening after dark could bring the
danger of roving elephants. Similarly, the use of slideshows
requires electricity, a projector, and a white screen, all of
which can be difficult to find in rural or remote areas without
prior arrangement. In some cases, the mode of delivery was
determined by the instructor on the spot, depending on the
size of the group and the facilities available at the time (Web
Appendix, TableW3, quote #25).
Summary We have described general elements of the bot-
tom-up marketing approach (Fig.1). In doing so, we used
notions of convergence and divergence in terms of the why
(vision for change and customized purpose, respectively),
the how (organic growth and grounded diffusion, respec-
tively), and the what (baseline platform and re-creating and
adapting innovation, respectively).
Study 2: Implementing thebottom‑up
marketing approach
Framework
We now develop the granular elements of the bottom-up
marketing framework demonstrated through a study of five
social enterprise firms. Continuing the description of the
framework in Fig.1, we present four elements of the shift
in mindsets: embracing unfamiliarity, exploring new ideas,
co-evolving with collaborators, and perspective-taking. For
each element, we elaborate on the contrast with the top-
down approach. Embracing unfamiliarity means that all lev-
els of leaders willingly immerse themselves in the ground
reality of their organization. Organizational routines must be
crafted and integrated to support this quest. Changing one’s
mindset is a challenging task, demanding proactive and
sustained effort. Likewise, the approach of exploration (vs.
exploitation) necessitates adopting a marketplace-oriented
mindset rather than a traditional market-based one. Doing
so allows new information to filter in before specific courses
of action are determined. Co-evolving is central in charting
out pathways bottom-up with collaborators. Closely aligned
with this is perspective-taking rather than premature nar-
rowing. We provide specific implications in Web Appendix,
TableW6.
We also present three phases of interweaving the bottom-
up with the macro level: iteratively immersing, empathizing,
and framing. For example, the immersion phase begins with
a micro-level unlearning and new-learning process under-
taken by members of the organization and then moves to a
collective macro-level systems thinking and abductive rea-
soning stage. Similarly, the empathizing phase begins with
field-level actions of showing compassion to and eliciting
contemplation from participants and then moves to abstract-
ing narratives and having them validated by a diverse range
of stakeholders.
Method
Study 2 examines five separate social enterprise start-ups
with which we are unaffiliated. We trace how an organiza-
tion’s journey starts from the moment of initial setbacks,
progresses through a fundamental shift in the mindsets of
the founders or leaders of the organization, and then achieves
its aims when it attains a seamless interweaving of the bot-
tom-up and macro level in a complementary manner. When
extended to marketers, the moment is one of reflection and
reinvention rather than failure. We unpack at a more granular
level the process by which an individual organization may
undertake a journey of the bottom-up marketing approach.
Observing social enterprises also allows us to draw closer
parallels to mainstream businesses and marketers. Although
social enterprises’ primary mission is to solve social prob-
lems, they do so by using market methods and a market-
based organizational form.
We take an emic approach to define setbacks of the
sampled ventures in their initial stages; that is, the market
performance of the ventures did not meet the expectations
and aspirations of the principal founders. Therefore, they
had to voluntarily discontinue marketing initial solutions
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
(i.e., products or services) to consumers. Note that failure
in this study does not mean that the ventures shuttered
their operations or that teams disintegrated; rather, the
ventures faced a setback in their initial attempt to solve a
social problem in a subsistence context and had to rethink
the strategy, tactics, and approaches toward working for
the betterment of consumers in subsistence marketplaces.
The interviews and field visits took place during these
phases of resilience, after the founders and team members
decided to start afresh following the setback. Thus, we
gain unique insight by focusing on “what changed” (rather
than on past mistakes) in the marketing approach of the
sampled social enterprises.
Research context We employed a discovery-oriented,
multi-case study approach (Eisenhardt, 1989) in line
with prior theory development efforts in marketing (e.g.,
Challagalla etal., 2014). We chose an early-stage start-up
incubator attached to an Indian business school for select-
ing cases. This incubator provides early-stage capital and
operational support to more than 50 start-ups per year,
across three separate funds. We chose the start-ups sup-
ported by a fund that focuses on “transformational entre-
preneurship” to solve pressing global challenges in rural
India. The start-ups in this fund are at the early stages of
ideation, which the incubator supports until the launch
of their solution in the market through seed and Series
A stage funding. The engagement of this incubator with
start-ups goes beyond capital investment; it extends to
product development support (e.g., makerspaces, design
labs), operational support (e.g., training, advisory ser-
vices), and logistical support (e.g., office space, access to
databases). More important, the incubator recognizes that
social entrepreneurship is challenging given the complex-
ity of problems being addressed. Thus, if a venture’s solu-
tion fails in market trials, the incubator extends its support
for testing new ideas as long as the ideas are pitched to the
incubator’s board anew.
One of the authors has been associated with the incuba-
tor as an adviser for a few years. This provided the research
team ready access to the start-up teams and their mentors.
To create a contrast between top-down and bottom-up
approaches to marketing, we purposively selected start-ups
that had failed in their initial marketing trial and attributed
their failure to a poor understanding of their consumers’
needs and social realities.
Data collection We combined interviews, archival data, and
observations. To understand the context before the study, we
conducted five interviews with “mentors,” who are experts
with an advisory role in the incubator (see sample in Web
Appendix, TableW4). These interviews helped us under-
stand the incubator’s portfolio of start-ups and identify 14
start-ups that were in the “pivoting” stage.2 We then inter-
viewed the founders of these start-ups to understand their
reasons for initial failure and pivoting. We purposively
sampled five new ventures from the initial set of 14 using
three criteria: (1) the venture’s solution was exclusively
targeted to subsistence consumers; (2) the venture’s initial
setback, as perceived by the founders, was due to a lack of
product-market fit (Gimmon & Levie, 2021) rather than a
lack of infusion of investments; and (3) the venture’s team
was actively working on designing a new solution or chang-
ing the business model through customer research. This
approach aligns with prior studies in marketing that use
cases for theory building (e.g., Coviello & Joseph, 2012).
We recruited respondents who either had an important role
in the selected ventures or were stakeholders (e.g., mentors)
who closely observed the venture’s functioning. Our sample
consisted of five cases, each representing a venture from one
of the following domains: education, clean energy, agricul-
tural finance, health services, and sanitation. We interviewed
16 team members (including founders) and five mentors
(Web Appendix, TableW4).
We explored a granular version of our overall research
goal of evolving the bottom-up marketing approach: How
do ventures use the bottom-up marketing approach to solve
social problems? We began the first phase of data collec-
tion by conducting unstructured interviews with start-up
founders and team members. These interviews began with
grand-tour questions (e.g., “What is your venture’s ambi-
tion? How does this translate to your short-term goals?”)
and moved on to questions focused on respondents’ cur-
rent product development and business model development
efforts. We also asked about how they conducted market
research and the process they used to translate consumer
problems into market solutions. All the interviews, which
lasted between 1hour and 30min and 2hours, took place in
a cafeteria located on the incubator’s campus. In this phase,
we also asked the founders to share internal documents (e.g.,
anonymized email correspondence, grant proposals) that
would help inform the research questions.
In the second phase, we participated in seven team meet-
ings by silently observing discussions. These meetings took
place during various stages of the venture’s pivoting journey.
The topics discussed in these meetings included taking stock
of past failure, creating a plan for market research, collating
team members’ insights from consumer interviews and field
visits, brainstorming for new product and business ideas,
and discussing feedback from mentors. During this phase,
we also made three field visits along with team members;
2 “Pivoting” is a term the incubator uses to describe the phase at
which start-ups redefine their products and/or business models
because of problems identified in their previous market trial.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
these visits involved 10–14-day-long immersions in vil-
lages, with activities ranging from unobtrusive observation
to depth interviews with subsistence consumers. During the
visits, we played the role of passive observers, shadowing
the venture’s team members during the day. We maintained
extensive field notes during these visits.
Data analysis Our unit of analysis is the venture’s team and
its associated mentors. We began with an in-depth reading
of archival documents, such as reports, slide decks, project
proposals, and email communications. The goal of this pro-
cess was to contextualize the remaining data and develop an
understanding of each venture’s motivation during the piv-
oting process. This is line with Eisenhardt’s (1989) recom-
mendation that theoretical development relies on its connec-
tion with empirical reality. We then moved to the interview
transcripts, notes from attending venture meetings, and notes
from the field visits. During the first round of coding, we
paid attention to recurring topics of discussion that captured
the key questions of the interview and our own research
question. We also allowed new codes to emerge generatively
from the data that were not necessarily connected with the
questions asked in the interview. Next, we coded field notes
to find support or to challenge our findings; we repeated this
process untilno longer generating new insights.
We used axial, second-order coding to search for relation-
ships between codes and converted them into higher-order
categories. To make sense of the categories, we returned
to the academic literature in some cases, particularly the
streams of literature on entrepreneurial ideation and sub-
sistence marketplaces. Finally, we performed selective cod-
ing (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to identify the core construct
of bottom-up marketing. To validate our findings, we used
member checks, asking venture team members and mentors
if our findings corresponded to their experience. After these
discussions, we revisited and revised details in the findings.
Findings
Our data suggest that the journey toward resilience and idea-
tion with a fresh perspective begins with a change of mind-
set. We summarize this mindset shift as a process involving
four key elements: unfamiliarity embracing (vs. avoiding),
exploring (vs. exploiting), co-evolving (vs. collaborating),
and perspective-taking (vs. premature narrowing) (Fig.2).
We overlay these granular elements on either side of the
general themes from Fig.1 to provide the complete frame-
work, including general and granular elements. These ele-
ments combine to form the bottom-up marketing journey,
which is a reflective and iterative process rather than a lin-
ear and sequential one. These mindset shifts later manifest
in collective decisions by the ventures’ founders and team
members as they move forward from the setback. Although
the anchors of the themes represent extremes, the mindsets
of venture founders and team members were heterogeneous
(Web Appendix, TableW5).
Embracing versus avoiding unfamiliarity All interviewees
noted that a major reason for their initial failure was that the
teams had made incorrect assumptions about the context of
subsistence marketplaces and the behavior of subsistence
consumers that became evident over time. These assump-
tions initially made by founders became more entrenched
as team members worked on developing products and busi-
ness models through five interrelated phases: (1) specifying
the challenge to solve in a particular facet of subsistence
consumers’ lives (e.g., lack of teaching aids for low-literate
Fig. 2 General and granular elements of bottom-up marketing framework
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
parents of primary school-age children), (2) creating a solu-
tion to this challenge (e.g., pictorial teaching aids for par-
ents), (3) articulating the impact of the solution (e.g., parents
becoming more involved in their children’s education), (4)
determining the distribution model (e.g., school teachers
introducing the teaching aids to parents), and (5) identify-
ing implementation partners (e.g., government-run primary
schools). Team members stated that, even when opinions
from external stakeholders indicated that the assumptions
were misplaced, the founders would dismiss or ignore them.
Most of the founders acknowledged that they were aware of
the social and cultural complexity in subsistence contexts,
but they nevertheless chose not to address it in initial phases
because of their confidence in the solutions their teams had
developed. This represents a top-down imposition of product
or solution (see Web Appendix, TableW5, quote #1).3
After their initial failure, teams realized that their pre-
conceptions of subsistence marketplaces were erroneous.
As the founder of the venture in Case 2 said, “More than
a change in our approach, we had to change our mindset”
(i.e., embracing market unfamiliarity rather than avoiding
it). Market unfamiliarity refers to the extent to which the
founders are unfamiliar with the usage environment of their
product/service solution in the market space. It is similar to,
though qualitatively of a different order of magnitude than,
the notion of “problem unfamiliarity” in new product devel-
opment. In the latter case, a new product development team
lacks precise knowledge of product users’ environment and
their latent needs (Nagaraj etal., 2020). As markets become
more unfamiliar, cognitive inertia becomes a barrier, in
that unfamiliar situations are interpreted as familiar ones
and new and surprising information becomes normalized
(Weick, 2006). In other words, the typical fallback or default
is to be top-down.
Embracing market unfamiliarity begins with acceptance
of the distinctiveness and complexity of subsistence mar-
ketplaces as a source of new ideas rather than as a threat to
preconceived ideas. The shift in mindset from avoiding to
embracing unfamiliarity manifests in three ways. First, teams
form a problem statement that allows flexibility in revising
the problem and expanding the solution space. For example,
early documents of Case 4 articulated the central problem as
a “lack of credible nutrition and health-related information
available to pregnant mothers” (Web Appendix, TableW5,
quote #2). Second, ventures expand the boundaries of their
solution space. Founders and team members brainstorm
about the new resources and capabilities they are willing
to develop if the problem statement evolves significantly.
Case 2 was a technology-focused venture until its initial
failure. It then decided to include a behavioral scientist and
a marketing specialist in the team to gain the flexibility to
work on innovative business models instead of improving
the technology as it learned from unfamiliar subsistence
marketplaces. Third, ventures realize the need to take a
user-centric approach to change their perspectives on the
realities of subsistence marketplaces. To do so, they shift
from reliance on surveys, secondary information, past expe-
riences, and advice from mentors to immersion in subsist-
ence marketplaces to understand the unknown aspects of the
culture, society, and consumer behavior. This immersion is
the foundation of the bottom-up marketing approach.
Exploring versus exploiting Our data suggest that, after
the initial failure, venture founders lean toward market-
ing exploitation rather than exploration.4 The reasons for
this inclination are threefold. First, exploration is costly
because it requires adding new capabilities and changing
routines. The additional costs after a failure necessitate
scouting for new investors, increasing borrowed capital, or
investing founders’ resources, all of which are challenging
immediately after solution failure. Second, exploration is a
time-consuming process and thus is in direct conflict with
founders’ sense of urgency to solve pressing problems in
subsistence marketplaces. Founders may also believe that
team members’ dedication to the venture may wane during
the exploration process. Third, exploration is non-directional
without a well-defined outcome. As the founder of Case 5
said, “I had to constantly question myself, what if nothing
comes out of our new search for consumer problems. Will
we have to shut down? Will we have the room to pivot?”
Exploration as described here is akin to a broad bottom-up
immersion articulated in the stream on subsistence market-
places (Viswanathan, 2016).
However, when mentors get involved, founders’ thinking
undergoes a significant shift from marketing exploitation
to exploration. Mentors achieve this in two ways: remind-
ing founders of their overarching vision and structuring the
process of marketing exploration. Quotes from mentors
3 This process is also emblematic of the “entrepreneurial hustle” – an
entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be use-
ful in addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under con-
ditions of uncertainty (Fisher etal., 2020). Though equally relevant to
all situations of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial hustle is even
more pronounced in subsistence contexts, driven by a sense of imme-
diacy in solving what is perceived as a pressing societal challenge.
4 We refer to the marketing strategy learning approaches of explora-
tion and exploitation as explained by Kyriakopoulos and Moorman
(2004). Marketing exploitation strategies involve making incremental
changes to existing marketing strategies, such as the marketing mix,
by leveraging existing capabilities and processes. By contrast, mar-
keting exploration involves making radical changes to prior marketing
strategies by generatively learning new knowledge and skills from the
external environment.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
exemplify their role in the shift of ventures from exploitation
to exploration (Web Appendix, TableW5, quotes #3 and #4).
Mentor (Case 5): I set a limit for [the founders]. Six
months. That is how long the incubator could continue
to support them. Take the first two or three months to
go to the grassroots and understand how people store
and get drinking water. Another couple of months to
get back on the drawing board. And then find partners
and get some pilots running by the sixth month.
Co‑evolving versus collaborating Co-evolving versus col-
laborating represents the “how” of the bottom-up market-
ing approach. Conventional wisdom suggests that social
enterprises benefit from partnerships with local value-chain
stakeholders, such as small and medium-sized enterprises,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community-
based organizations (Rivera-Santos etal., 2012). When the
focal problem and solution are predetermined, ventures
search downstream markets for partners that are willing to
collaborate to promote or market the solution to subsistence
consumers. The process of collaboration involves back-and-
forth conversations between the venture and the potential
partner on the nature of the solution and on aligning busi-
ness interests and operational processes. An email exchange
between the founder of Case 2 and a local NGO sheds light
on collaboration (Web Appendix, TableW5, quotes #5 and
#6). As illustrated, the nature and scope of the solution and
its intended customers are already decided at the outset. The
outcome of the collaboration effort depends on how well
a venture’s solution and business model are aligned with
the mandate and resources of the potential partner. With
a focus on costs, benefits, and operational aspects, there is
little scope for mutual learning between the venture and the
partner.
A shift from a top-down to a bottom-up approach involves
approaching partnerships as co-evolving opportunities rather
than business collaborations (Viswanathan, 2016). Local
stakeholders are valuable sources of knowledge about how
cultural traditions, institutions, and social norms influence
the behavior of subsistence consumers. Gaining such knowl-
edge is necessary at the ideation stage of the venture’s prod-
uct or service, not just at the implementation stage when
marketing functions are outsourced to collaborating part-
ners. Ventures in our sample needed to include local stake-
holders in ideation and brainstorming discussions at the
stage of developing a new product after their initial failures
(Web Appendix, TableW5, quote #7).
Perspective‑taking versus premature narrowing Embracing
unfamiliarity, exploring contexts, and co-evolving with part-
ners gradually help the founders become comfortable with
taking a clear perspective of problems and solutions. This
perspective taking is in contrast with what is referred to in
the literature as “need for cognitive closure” (i.e., a desire for
a quick and firm answer to a question) (Kruglanski & Web-
ster, 1996). Situational factors prevalent in subsistence con-
texts, such as high environmental uncertainty, and individual
differences can drive a founder’s need for cognitive closure.
When this need is high, the perceived benefits of closure are
foregrounded, its perceived costs become de-emphasized,
and, as a result, premature narrowing to a specific set of
ideas ensues. The bottom-up marketing approach enables
managers to challenge assumptions and shift their marketing
perspective by immersing themselves in unfamiliar contexts.
However, an initial obstacle to this approach is the lack of
appreciation for subjective experiences and learning from
immersion (vs. reliance on narrower insights from quantita-
tive data). Important here is to both converge and diverge
rather than remain in one mode or prematurely converge.
An informant noted the nature of this challenge faced by
her team members (Web Appendix, TableW5, quote #8).
Summary Each of the four subthemes helps move an organ-
ization along the bottom-up journey (Fig.2).5 A shifting
mindset is essential, as subsistence contexts are unfamiliar
to an external organization, and thus allows it to transcend
beyond what it already knows. Such a mindset reflects the
essence of the bottom-up orientation evolved in the sub-
sistence marketplaces research stream. What then follows
is exploring (vs. exploiting) what has been labeled “mar-
ketplaces” in this research stream. An organization adopts
a learning mindset to determine whether and where it fits
in the overall problem-and-solution space. This then paves
the way for co-evolving with other entities as one among
several value creators. Conventionally, marketing strategy
has been conceptualized as a focal firm’s complex set of
efforts to develop markets in its self-interest while outdoing
its peers (Hunt & Morgan, 1997). In such a paradigm, any
collaboration between firms tends to be instrumental, and
its parameters and success indicators are tightly pre-defined.
For example, the idea of coopetition (i.e., limited collabo-
ration between competing firms) emerged in the literature
but remained driven by self-interest (Ho & Ganesan, 2013).
By contrast, we describe co-evolving as collaboration that
is driven by collective interest and consumer well-being.
5 However, the journey cannot begin in the first place without the
recognition and tolerance of an initial failure. Recent views in mar-
keting emphasize a “failure-tolerant organizational culture” in which
failures are openly addressed and treated as learning episodes (Vomb-
erg etal., 2020). Such a norm of constructively handling initial fail-
ures is necessary for an organization to engender the mindset shifts
we describe. Lacking such a norm, organizations may endlessly tinker
with marginal improvements in solutions without a more fundamental
shift in mindset (Fig.1).
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
This description substantially moves the marketing strategy
dialogue along the direction of collective strategy making,
adding to emerging ideas of collaborative market driving
(Maciel & Fischer, 2020).
A final subtheme related to perspective taking is giving
pause so as to connect the dots. The proverbial “dots” here
are issues and opportunities, and the mindset requires avoid-
ing prematurely zeroing in on predetermined issues, as doing
so would neglect the multitude of issues and their intercon-
nections. In other words, this theme is about determining
what the dots are and can be before connecting a subset of
them. The literature commonly uses related terms such as
“collaboration,” “customization,” and “co-creation.” How-
ever, in our view, such terms are outcome-focused rather
than process-focused and embody a top-down flow of strat-
egy, in contrary to a bottom-up journey of exploration and
co-evolution.
We asked mentors how the shift in mindsets that emerged
from our data may apply to other ventures within the incu-
bator’s transformational entrepreneurship program. The
general view was that when ventures seek to develop solu-
tions for markets that are either unfamiliar to the founders
or volatile and evolving by nature, a top-down approach to
marketing has high chances of failure. Conversations within
the incubator that were started during the author’s engage-
ment with mentors for this research emphasized the need to
rethink the nature of support provided to start-ups that aim
to address complex social problems.
Mentor (Case 5): You will observe here [in the incuba-
tor] that all founders are in a hurry, mostly because of
the “win fast or lose” culture that is being promoted.
This approach does not work for start-ups working on
radical ideas to solve real, hard problems. We need to
slow them down, allow more exploration, more experi-
mentation. Merely giving them advice or mentoring is
not enough to change how they approach social prob-
lems.
Shifting mindsets by exploring, co-evolving, and perspec-
tive-taking were recognized as requiring deep engagement
with the context of intervention. The incubator’s leadership
acknowledged that start-up founders need to have the time,
space, and opportunities to develop a grounded perspec-
tive of the problems they intend to solve. These discussions
were intended to rectify the “worryingly high failure rates of
social ventures that are working on misidentified problems
and learn from the ones that did well” (Mentor, Case 1). A
few months after data collection for this research ended, the
incubator instituted a generously funded “discovery fellow-
ship program” for start-up founders to spend six months in
the field to interact with multiple stakeholders before devel-
oping solutions.
Interweaving bottom‑up andmacro levels
A key moment of transition following the shift in mindsets
is when iterative interweaving occurs between the bottom-up
and macro levels. Research has referred to this as a dance
between the bottom-up and top-down in the subsistence
marketplaces stream (Viswanathan, 2016). The literature
in this stream reiterates that neither approach is superior
but that the bottom-up approach is more difficult and often
neglected in unfamiliar contexts filled with uncertainty.
Although respondents reported shifts in their mindset toward
the former after their initial setback and reflections, during
interviews and field visits we did not observe a complete
abandonment of the latter. Instead, we found that founders
and team members preserve both upward- and downward-
flowing ideas and allow them to reciprocally influence each
other in designing eventual interventions.
Founder (Case 4): When you don’t understand the situ-
ation in the villages well enough … the complexities
involved in that situation … the starting point itself is
wrong. We tried to generalize the problems without
understanding the peculiarities. But that doesn’t mean
that we only focus on peculiarities, because that will
mean developing something for a very small target
group. I guess it is a mix of both understanding pecu-
liarities and generalizing simultaneously.
Our data show that the interweaving of micro and macro
levels occurs through three interrelated rather than sequen-
tial processes: (1) immersing, (2) empathizing, and (3)
framing.6
Bottom‑up immersion The learning process starts with
founders and team members selecting a few sites that pre-
sent extreme forms of the challenge that the venture aims
to address. The site may be a single village or a cluster of
villages, where the team members make multiple visits over
the course of a few months. The selection of these “learning”
sites is guided by information available from the internet,
founders’ own experiences, recommendation by mentors,
and recommendation by founders of other ventures operat-
ing in the same domain. For example, if the focal challenge
6 Interweaving in another context has been described as a means
to integrate research and practice: “Our problem is to find a way by
which the specialist’s kind of knowledge and the executive’s kind of
knowledge can be joined” (Follett, 1924, p. 70). Follett explains that
knowledge about a new situation is cocreated through a process of
interweaving situation-specific knowledge and an individual’s spe-
cialist knowledge. Rather than merely aggregating these two diverse
strands of knowledge, interweaving involves understanding the situ-
ation holistically by reciprocally and continuously relating contextual
understanding to specialists’ insights (Stout & Love, 2015).
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
the venture wants to solve is the poor quality of primary
education in rural areas, the founders may choose a cluster
of villages with high rates of dropout from the local primary
school.
Founder (Case 1): We looked at reports of learning
assessment surveys published by various NGOs and
also consulted district-level data of primary school
completion. After identifying a few potential places,
we zeroed in on villages where we could travel in a day
and where we could stay in a hotel not farther than five
to six kilometers. I travel(ed) alone a few times to a
few villages, maybe three to four times, to meet people
there and see if they were willing to let us be there. It
took me a month to finally decide where we wanted to
go as a team.
During these learning trips, team members spend the first
few days acquainting themselves with the local leaders and
village elders to gain their support. For the first few days,
they make their presence felt by participating in community
gatherings, weddings, festivals, and places where villagers
frequent. As a team member of Case 4 said, “After two vis-
its, the villagers knew us by name, and we knew them by
theirs. We waited till there was such a level of comfort that
natural conversations did not get disrupted by us being pre-
sent.” Team members also use the initial days to understand
the cultural and social milieu of the learning site. Almost
all interviews affirmed the importance of developing such
understanding to contextualize the behaviors of individual
consumers observed later.
After developing initial familiarity, team members
selected individual consumers and households to observe
more closely. The team discussed and determined the con-
sumption situations that could be of potential interest for
observing behaviors. For example, for a venture that aims to
solve the lack of scientifically validated information avail-
able to pregnant mothers (Case 4), consumption situations
may include visits to the health center, interactions with
elders in the household, visits to the market to purchase
medicines and grocery, cooking food at home, and using
smartphones to watch health-related videos. When the team
is back at the learning site, they embed in spaces where these
consumption situations are performed. They view observa-
tion not as an opportunity to conduct an interview or collect
data but as a means for unlearning what they know about
consumer behavior and for shifting their perspectives about
how behaviors are shaped and performed (Web Appendix,
TableW5, quote #9).
Macro‑level synthesis of immersion On average, we found
that the teams in our sample conducted five visits to immerse
themselves in subsistence contexts to observe consumers
without intrusion. After the first or the first few visits, team
members who have gone through the immersion exercise
meet to synthesize their observations. At this stage, the
teams may consult with experts’ about their observations.
During the process of synthesis, the aim is to take a systemic
or “gestalt” view of the problems observed. The focus is on
examining not only the specific problems but also the envi-
ronment in which that problem exists. Discussions revolve
around what the consumers’ needs connected with the prob-
lem are, how these relate to the consumers’ environment,
what the observed social factors influencing or causing the
problem are, and how the local market addresses, ignores, or
exacerbates the problem. This process of synthesis involves
abductive reasoning (Martin, 2010) that uses experts’ and
team members’ specialist knowledge to find explanations
for the observed problems.
Team member (Case 2): It surprised us to see that
despite the amount of smoke in kitchens, there was
hardly any ventilation in those spaces. Making a hole
to their temporary walls is easy … it is not difficult
to make windows even after houses are built. One of
our team members observed that some women were
cooking food outside. Back in our office, when we put
these two observations together, we realized that cook-
ing indoors mostly happens in extreme weather, when
the women would like to keep the kitchens protected
from rain or cold. In pleasant weather, women tend to
cook outside. Hence, we learned that our cookstoves
should be portable. Connecting to a power source will
not work outside.
As evident from the quote, the process of abduction is not
necessarily analytical; it also blends intuitive thinking at the
time of synthesis. The process of observation and synthesis
is iterative and repeats until team members feel confident
that they have understood the problem to design the form
and features of their new solution. There is a wide range in
the number of iterations and the duration of each iteration
across teams. In Case 5, the founders and team members
conducted 14 field visits, each lasting for about three days,
punctuated by synthesizing observations in between. The
team of Case 3, by contrast, conducted only three field visits,
with each visit lasting about three weeks.
Bottom‑up deep empathizing In the next phase, members of
the venture return to the community to present their findings
and assumptions from the synthesis process. A team member
described the process of conducting the second round of
interactions (Web Appendix, TableW5, quote #10):
This form of “deep listening” involves paying attention to
layers of meaning and emotion that are entrenched in conver-
sations, as opposed to simply hearing words on the surface
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
(Hart, 2023). Deep listening involves developing an emo-
tional connection with the experiences of the speaker. When
interacting with the community after developing familiarity
with members during the observation phase, we found that
the conversations tend to be emotionally rich; expressions
of frustration are as common as expressions of surprise and
curiosity when community members respond to the venture
team’s observations. These reactions and personal accounts
of community members help the venture team develop a
deeper cognitive and emotional understanding of the situa-
tion, theproblems, and the practicality of potential solutions.
Venture team members respond to such emotionally rich
accounts by expressing sympathy (e.g., “We observed this
in other villages too; this is a big problem”) and empathy
(e.g., “I am already experiencing how your eyes burn in that
kitchen”). In this regard, thesubsistence marketplaces litera-
ture has described immersion as the process of moving from
sympathy to informed empathy (Viswanathan, 2016). At the
same time, the venture team also must tactfully encourage
the speaker to contemplate more deeply aboutthe causes of
the problems described. A team member of Case 1 described
this process of moving back and forth between expressing
compassion and encouraging contemplation as follows:
What some women said how their own children had
to suffer because of water-borne diseases was deeply
moving. As she spoke, we held a glass of that dirty,
brown water in our hands. One can get so captivated by
such accounts that it becomes challenging to ask any-
thing more. We just kept silent for some time. Gradu-
ally, we started asking, “How could this be avoided?”
“What would you have done differently?” Because, we
have to zoom in [to] their struggles and also zoom out
at some point to create the bigger picture.
Respondents noted that they often heard conflicting per-
spectives from community members. As each conversa-
tion has personal stories and experiences as the focal point,
contradicting or questioning the interviewee’s perspectives
became challenging for the interviewer. In such situations,
empathetically narrating others’ accounts helped prompt
community members to explain why their own experience
may differ from others’. As a team member said, “We cannot
resolve conflicting statements, because we have simply not
lived their lives. We let individuals [community members]
do it themselves by telling other individuals’ stories.” By
doing so, the venture team motivates community members
to reconsider their own experiences and piece together a
generalized view of the situation and problems in a bottom-
up manner.
Macro‑level validation of empathizing Distilling oppor-
tunities from observations, emotion-laden stories, and
descriptions of the situation in the community’s voice can
be formidable. In the words of a mentor, the venture team
seemed “directionless and confused, but also emotionally
charged” after conversations with community members. At
this point, the venture team uses a variety of techniques such
as personas and storyboarding to create “problem–poten-
tial solution” models based on the previous phases. A team
member of Case 4 described this process as follows:
We first shorten the stories we heard to [their] capsule
form—just retaining the main content that can inform
the final solution and its connection with the prob-
lem. Next, we look at the emotions associated with
the problems as people narrated their stories to us. The
sentiments and emotions are like a guide. They help us
identify triggers of problems and points of interven-
tion. Sometimes, the emotional elements around pain
points are subtle. We have to magnify them through
discussion and reflection.
As the quote indicates, abridging narratives of com-
munity members helps the venture team create a heuristic
model of the problem to be addressed. Identifying points at
which emotions escalate paves the way for devising potential
solutions to problems by pinpointing the triggers of current
behavior. As a next step, the teams met stakeholders who
hold influence over consumers’ behavior in subsistence con-
texts and presented their identified problems and potential
solutions. There was considerable diversity in the nature of
these stakeholders among our respondents. They included
local NGOs, religious institutions, public institutions such
as schools and health centers, the local administration, mer-
chants and retailers, and elected representatives.
The purpose of speaking with stakeholders was not just
to validate ideas but also to ensure that the ventures’ under-
standing was inclusive and encompassed diverse perspec-
tives of the community. For example, the founder of Case
3 noted in initial visits to villages, of having missed out
on interviewing migrant laborers who owned small parcels
of farmland, because they were away during the season of
the year when the visits were made. These migrant laborers
tend to be excluded from the conventional finance system
because of the lack of identification documents. The team
later realized that these consumers could benefit the most
from their mobile credit application, as long as a literate
intermediary was involved. Without macro-level validation
with local agricultural input retailers, this important source
of opportunity would have been overlooked by the team.
Bottom‑up interactional framing After the process of idea-
tion within the team and visualizing potential reconfigured
solutions, the ventures introduce them to members of the
community who they consider potential early adopters or
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
opinion leaders. Before introduction, the team members
spend a significant amount of time deciding on how the
solution should be presented to the community mem-
bers. In doing so, the solution is presented in its concrete
form, focusing on its features, rather than explaining the
rationale behind the addition of features or how the solu-
tion can benefit consumers. “We pare down the solution to
its barebones, stripping it of all other explanations or the
design logic,” one of the founders explained. The com-
munity members are then allowed time to reflect on the
solution and think of its potential uses for them. In cases in
which ventures designed a prototype (e.g., Cases 2 and 5),
it is installed in select village households, and community
members are encouraged to use it for a few weeks. After
this initial introduction, team members go back to the com-
munity members to understand how they used the solution
and why it could be useful to them. In effect, the ventures
allow the community members to create meaning for the
solution through their own experience and social interac-
tions. This is akin to the process of interactional framing
(Gray etal., 2015), which suggests that social interac-
tion aids in constructing, reinterpreting, and transforming
meanings through the process of framing. As one respond-
ent explained, personal stories are essentially meanings
that household members assign to the solution through
their own experiences and through interaction with oth-
ers in their household and neighborhood (Web Appendix,
TableW5, quote #12). Venture team members interpret
these subjectively constructed meanings and then intro-
duce their own logic for designing the solution and how
they intended it to be used. This is usually done with the
assistance of community leaders who can help individuals
understand the ventures’ frames in simple language. In one
of the field visits, we observed the process of interactional
framing among venture members, community members,
and community leaders, as illustrated in the following dis-
cussion related to Case 3:
Farmer: It doesn’t feel like a loan. It is like advance
payment given to the agricultural retailer. We already
do that.
Team-member (Case 3): The idea is that the loan
is now linked to the products. We will pay the full
amount to the retailer, and you will pay it back to us
after harvest.
Community leader: It is like borrowing from one and
then paying back to another. And those two have some
agreement between them that we don’t need to worry
about.
The frames evolve through interactions sometimes
sequentially focusing on the “what,” “how,” and “why.
In the first interaction, venture members and potential
consumers discuss what the solution does, without discuss-
ing the rationale behind the solution or how it can be use-
ful. The second set of interactions involves how consumers
intend to use the solution, and venture members explain how
they intended the solution to be used. The final set of inter-
actions deliberate on why the solution can be useful for the
community in the short and long run.
Macro‑level incorporation of framing Repeated conversa-
tions with the community on the “what–how–why” of the
intended solution lead to the emergence of an interactionally
framed meaning. The frames often differ between consumer
groups within a village and across villages with different
cultural and social environments. The venture team members
then present these frames to mentors, business partners, and
potential investors to obtain their opinions and feedback.
Experts advise the team on the feasibility of solutions based
on aspects such as market trends and climate, differentiation
from existing products, resources and capabilities needed
to implement the solution, and its long-term viability. In
these meetings, team members enact the role of advocates
of subsistence consumers, persuasively arguing in favor of
each solution from a consumer-centric perspective and, at
the same time, inviting experts to critique their arguments
(Web Appendix, TableW5, quote #13).
We term this process of selecting solutions and infusing
marketing acumen and logic into consumer-driven ideas as
“incorporation.” In this stage, we found that teams make
efforts to retain the voice of the consumer during the incor-
poration process. Cases 2, 4, and 5 identified “champion”
consumers from the initial immersion stage, who the teams
regularly consulted even as they were considering and incor-
porating experts’ feedback into the final solution. In some
cases, the views of experts can be in direct conflict with
the motivations behind the solutions presented to them. In
such cases, champion consumers are necessary to triangu-
late feedback before arriving at consensus within the team.
In another case, a team member who had spent the most
amount of time with subsistence consumers during the previ-
ous two phases took on the consumers’ “voice,” as evident
in the following quote:
Team member (Case 1): I had spent so much time
with children, teachers, and parents that I had almost
started thinking like a parent of a child going to a
village primary school. I became the de facto cus-
tomer specialist in the team. On one occasion, our
mentor suggested that operating a call center is not
financially feasible. I had to pitch in and say that for
an illiterate parent who cannot read WhatsApp chats,
talking to a real person is the only practical option.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
And call centers are cheaper to operate than having
a person on [the] ground.
For the mentors and other experts consulted by the teams,
subsistence contexts are an unknown terrain. Continuing the
process of interweaving the macro level with the bottom-up
frame helps balance business priorities with the ventures’
motivation to do good for society. Incorporation also serves
as a stepping stone for ventures to finalize their business
model and pitch it to potential investors for funding. Inter-
weaving with the bottom-up at this stage helps them realize
Table 1 Implications of the bottom-up marketing approach for practice
General elements Implications for practice
Why
Convergence: vision for change
Divergence: customized purpose
• Conduct sensemaking workshops to evolve shared vision of the identity orientation of the firm
(“who we are”) and market/social innovation (“what we are here for”)
• Conduct brainstorming to evolve purposes across geographies or marketplace distinctions, shar-
ing macro vision/identity
• Conduct periodic immersive meetings to revisit the purpose(s) to remain alert and adaptable to
changes in ground realities
How
Convergence: organic growth and evolution
Divergence: grounded diffusion
• Evolve and organize field teams by highly localized marketplace distinctions (e.g., language,
community, tribe)
• Engender organic culture in teams by marketplace distinctions, including norms of autonomy,
interaction, and communication
• Co-evolve exploratory and emergent contextual implementation
• Leverage stakeholder resources and partnerships with failure-tolerant logic and offerings with
contextual understanding
What
Convergence: baseline platform
Divergence: re-creating social innovation
• Build a platform ecosystem: products, information, delivery, experiences
• Design a core market/social innovation platform atomized to discrete firms
• Re-create unique offerings on demand across geographies or marketplace distinctions (built on a
single platform ecosystem)
Mindset shifts Implications for practice
Embracing vs. avoiding unfamiliarity • Provide deep context immersions for senior managers in unfamiliar contexts
• Conduct localized, context-embedded design thinking workshops for project managers
• Conduct unlearning and mindfulness bootcamps to unlock mental space boundaries
Exploring vs. exploiting • Develop mentoring relationships for senior managers to encourage open and non-directional
exploration through immersion
• Conduct“discovery” workshops for creative expression and negotiating complexity
• Form collaborations with academia and social enterprises to co-design time-intensive and non-
directional exploratory projects
Co-evolving vs. collaborating • Conduct“ideation” workshops with stakeholders with complementary vantage points; “mutual-
ism” sessions at senior levels to de-emphasize instrumental win-wins
• Conduct joint field visits to help identify convergent interests; break down processes and hier-
archies – genuine co-adaptation barriers and limit co-evolution in instrumental collaboration;
empower diverse stakeholders to provide insights for co-evolution
Perspective taking vs. premature narrowing • Conduct“perspective” workshops when onboarding project staff (including follow-ups); broad
immersion sessions for staff before embarking on specific deep dives
• Expand diversity of stakeholder relationships to foster perspective-taking; “conceptualization”
exercises to articulate problem and solution spaces
Interweaving Implications for practice
Bottom-up immersion
Macro-level synthesis
• Provide immersive learning experiences during onboarding (virtual/in-person); phased visits for
teams to enable gradual perspective taking
• Conduct workshops on iterating bottom-upand macro-level to generate insights; development of
outcomes/assessments based on grounded insights
• Interweave and aggregate ground-level learnings (e.g., counterproductive consumer behavior)
and high-level understandings (e.g., literacy challenge) into a seamless middle ground (e.g., need
for marketplace literacy)
Bottom-up deep empathizing
Macro-level validation
• Conduct empathic revisits to share learnings and engage in deep listening as communities dis-
cuss satisfactions and contradictions; abridging narratives to distil opportunities
• Develop models of problem–solution
Bottom-up interactional framing
Macro-level incorporation
• Gather bottom-up responses to solutions or prototypes; understand what–how–why from poten-
tial users
• Frame solution interactionally; develop interactional framed meaning of solution; seek input
from top-down sources
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
multiple benefits, with both financial and social outcomes
being critical.
Discussion
We explicate a bottom-up marketing approach that devel-
oped in the context of identifying and solving marketing
problems of subsistence marketplaces by researchers, NGOs,
and social enterprises. Nevertheless, the theoretical princi-
ples contained in this bottom-up marketing approach can
make a useful contribution in virtually any marketing con-
text. The typical marketing activity of identifying consumer
needs by conducting market research and designing prod-
ucts and services based on those needs is driven by a firm's
strategic priorities and bound by its resources and thus is
top-down by nature. Recent trends have advocated infusing
bottom-up elements within an overall top-down management
process, such as crowdsourcing ideas through open innova-
tion contests in the consumer community (Hofstetter etal.,
2018) or having lead users co-create emergent product and
service ideas (Lilien etal., 2002). The framework represent-
ing the bottom-up marketing approach can systematically
advance the discipline.
At the same time, the strategic priorities of firms and
policymakers cannot be neglected if a reimagined market-
ing framework for subsistence marketplaces is to have any
practical value. Indeed, the rich stream of literature on base-
of-the-pyramid marketing has significantly influenced busi-
nesses primarily because of its focus on the opportunities for
profitability through market-based solutions for low-income
markets (Dembek etal., 2019). The bottom-up framework,
through its processes of immersion and emersion, helps
ensure that managerial priorities are not sidelined in the
efforts to remove inequities in subsistence marketplaces.
Marketing scholars have lamented that social marketing
has been a major missing player in the global quest to find
solutions for the grand challenge of poverty (Lee & Kot-
ler, 2009). The bottom-up marketing approach we evolved
herein (see Fig.1and 2) offers a transformational journey
toward greater effectiveness and impact on both counts. The
approach promotes a fundamental “inside-out” mindset shift,
encouraging organizations to treat the marketplace as a set
of discoverable original phenomena rather than as a context
in which to apply or even customize their rules and tools,
adopting the iterative steps depicted in Fig.1and 2.Implica-
tions for practice are presented in Table1.
We demonstrated that customer-driven elements are
embedded within a top-down approach and thus are not
sufficiently bottom-up. Our bottom-up marketing approach
provides a complementary counter-perspective, while also
interweaving the macro level. In doing so, it addresses larger
issues that need a comprehensive view of social, institu-
tional, and cultural elements of grand challenges at different
levels of analysis and the interplay between these levels. In
addition, it addresses immediate, concrete issues consum-
ers face in their daily lives. As the primary discipline from
which the stream of subsistence marketplaces has emerged,
marketing can become a catalyzing “hub” to evolve and
apply the bottom-up marketing approach, creating a bridge
to sustainable development.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplemen-
tary material available at https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s11747- 024- 01022-z.
Funding Open access funding provided by SCELC, Statewide Califor-
nia Electronic Library Consortium.
Declarations
Competing interests The authors declare that they have no conflict
of interest.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes
were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated
otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in
the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will
need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a
copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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... Much effort, particularly in less developed countries, has involved job creation and creating income generation opportunities for people at the bottom of the pyramid. I In this special issue, Viswanathan et al. (2024) propose an innovative, bottom-up approach to address these grand challenges. Focusing on a few select challenges, such as reducing poverty (SDG 1), increasing financial literacy (SDG 4), and reducing inequalities (SDG 10), Viswanathan et al. (2024) integrate research from multiple domains, including financial literacy and subsistence marketing (e.g., Viswanathan Two additional papers also focus on societal benefits but are discussed in greater detail under the economy section, as well as the coordination through technology section. ...
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... Grewal et al. (2024) focuses on addressing issues pertaining to food waste and alleviating hunger, while Hemann, Williams and Puntoni (2024) focus on issues associated with reduction of poverty, improving health, and increasing literacy though AI. et al., 2005, 2010). Furthermore, Viswanathan et al. (2024) highlight the importance of addressing convergent versus divergent elements, as they relate to the Why (overarching shared vision), the How (marketing strategies, tactics, and processes), and the What (the actual offering of the program). By weaving together bottom-up elements with macro elements, Viswanathan et al. (2024) provide a broad framework for addressing poverty. ...
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