The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits Pearson Education Inc., Wharton School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2004; Pages: 432; Price: US $ 29.99; ISBN: 0-13-146750-6. The treasure lying at the bottom of the world's economic pyramid, attracts companies with unimaginable prospects and profits. The economic pyramid of the world contains more than 400 crores of population at the bottom whose earnings and spendings per capita are low, but as an aggregate, are much larger than they are perceived to be. Hence, it is high time for the corporate managers to make an effort to locate the Alibaba's treasure lying hidden at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). Broadly, the characteristics and spending patterns of the BOP segment are different as compared to the other segments of the society. In the high and medium range markets, consumers are able to buy bigger packages of consumables such as a 10 kg packet of detergents so that they need not shop frequently. But low-end BOP consumers do not have so much disposable cash to buy in bulk and store. Hence, it is suggested that this segment be provided with "single serve" packages. Already in India, 30% of personal care and other consumables such as shampoo, tea, and cold medicines are sold in single serve packages and most single serve packages are priced at one rupee. Hindustan Lever Limited offers Clinic Plus shampoo priced at 50 Paisa. The major differences between the Bottom of the Pyramid and the Top of the Pyramid markets are differences in buying habits and cultural differences. The Bottom of the Pyramid is characterized by a low brand consciousness due to low economic position, and is mostly need driven. Major emerging BOP markets in the world, including China, India, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Indonesia, with a combined population of about 300 crores, represent 70% of the world BOP population. Such a huge jumbo size BOP market promises intense marketing opportunities for the companies. THE BOOK UNDER REVIEW Part 1 of the book emphasizes the development of an appropriate framework for the active engagement of the private sector at the BOR It provides the basis for a profitable win-win situation for all stake holders involved in the process of catering to BOP markets. Part 2 describes 12 cases, in a variety of businesses where BOP is becoming an active market and is bringing benefits to its customers far beyond offering just products. Part 3 contains stories in video form-an attempt to present the prospects and prosperity underlying the BOP markets, and to bring the BOP markets into limelight. Around 100 hrs of video was collected as part of the research. The book specifies workable solutions for serving huge population lying at the bottom of the world's economic pyramid. Even with NGOs working tirelessly and government support and international aid being circulated heavily, the problem of poverty still persists. According to the author, the main reason for this situation is that the private sector, which is huge and potentially capable of solving any problem in the world, is practically not involved. The concept of 'Bottom of the Pyramid" is explained in this book. The World's Economic Pyramid contains wealthy people at the top with high spending capacities and habits. But the size of this segment is very small i.e., only about 7.5 to 10 crores of 600 crores plus population, whereas more than 400 crores of population live at the bottom of the pyramid earning less than $2 per day and in India alone around 40 crores of people earn less than Rs. 90 per day. The author opines that, to effectively serve this BOP market, instead of old and tried solutions, continuous innovation and a paradigm shift in the thinking process of the private sector is needed. THE BOOK PRESENTS CASES OF COMPANIES THAT ARE INVOLVED IN BOP MARKETING * The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF): It established the Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO) in 1995 to market, install, and serve the Solar Home Systems (SHS) in south India. …

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits

Using Data Sciences in Digital Marketing: Framework, methods, and performance metrics

Integrating renewable sources into energy system for smart city as a sagacious strategy towards clean and sustainable process

The complex and interdependent nature of smart cities raises significant political, technical, and socioeconomic challenges for designers, integrators and organisations involved in administrating these new entities. An increasing number of studies focus on the security, privacy and risks within smart cities, highlighting the threats relating to information security and challenges for smart city infrastructure in the management and processing of personal data. This study analyses many of these challenges, offers a valuable synthesis of the relevant key literature, and develops a smart city interaction framework. The study is organised around a number of key themes within smart cities research: privacy and security of mobile devices and services; smart city infrastructure, power systems, healthcare, frameworks, algorithms and protocols to improve security and privacy, operational threats for smart cities, use and adoption of smart services by citizens, use of blockchain and use of social media. This comprehensive review provides a useful perspective on many of the key issues and offers key direction for future studies. The findings of this study can provide an informative research framework and reference point for academics and practitioners.

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Security, Privacy and Risks Within Smart Cities: Literature Review and Development of a Smart City Interaction Framework.

The main objective of this exploratory study is to identify the social, economic, environmental and cultural factors related to the sustainable care of both environment and public health that most concern Twitter users. With 336 million active users as of 2018, Twitter is a social network that is increasingly used in research to get information and to understand public opinion as exemplified by Twitter users. In order to identify the factors related to the sustainable care of environment and public health, we have downloaded n = 5873 tweets that used the hashtag #WorldEnvironmentDay on the respective day. As the next step, sentiment analysis with an algorithm developed in Python and trained with data mining was applied to the sample of tweets to group them according to the expressed feelings. Thereafter, a textual analysis was used to group the tweets according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identifying the key factors about environment and public health that most concern Twitter users. To this end, we used the qualitative analysis software NVivo Pro 12. The results of the analysis enabled us to establish the key factors that most concern users about the environment and public health such as climate change, global warming, extreme weather, water pollution, deforestation, climate risks, acid rain or massive industrialization. The conclusions of the present study can be useful to companies and institutions that have initiatives related to the environment and they also facilitate decision-making regarding the environment in non-profit organizations. Our findings will also serve the United Nations that will thoroughly review the 17 SDGs at the High-level Political Forum in 2019.

Understanding #WorldEnvironmentDay User Opinions in Twitter: A Topic-Based Sentiment Analysis Approach.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the construct of retail customer experience (CE) and its links to satisfaction and loyalty; and to test whether loyalty programmes perform a moderating effect on those links. Design/methodology/approach – A variety of retail attributes are integrated to develop a holistic CE construct using formative measures, with four in-built, differentiated replication studies conducted in the supermarket and department store sectors in China. Findings – The empirical results confirm the model of CE’s impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty; but reveal that loyalty programmes perform an insignificant moderating role in enhancing the linkages in the model. Research limitations/implications – Further studies may examine whether our findings hold true for each individual loyalty programme. The paper calls for more studies based on multiple, in-built, differentiated replication studies and measures to encourage publication of negative empirical results so as to ensure ...

/pdf/examining-retail-customer-experience-and-the-moderation-51hx4twnay.pdf

Examining retail customer experience and the moderation effect of loyalty programmes

The global development of the Internet, which enabled the analysis of large amounts of data and the services linked to their use, has led companies to modify their business strategies in search of new ways to increase marketing productivity and profitability. Many strategies are based on business intelligence (BI) and marketing intelligence (MI) that make it possible to extract profitable knowledge and insights from large amounts of data generated by company customers in digital environments. In this context, the present study proposes a three-step research methodology based on data text mining (DTM). In further research, this methodology can be used for business intelligence analysis (BIA) strategies to analyze user generated content (UGC) in social networks and on digital platforms. The proposed methodology unfolds in the following three stages. First, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model that determines the database topic is used. Second, a sentiment analysis (SA) is proposed. This SA is applied to the LDA results to divide the topics identified in the sample into negative, positive, and neutral sentiments. Thirdly, textual analysis (TA) with data text mining techniques is applied on the topics in each sentiment. The proposed methodology offers important advances in data text mining in terms of accuracy, reliability and insight generation for both researchers and practitioners seeking to improve the BIA processes in business and other sectors.

A Three-Stage method for Data Text Mining: Using UGC in Business Intelligence Analysis

Sustainable smart cities: creating spaces for technological, social and business development

Sustainable Smart Cities

To counter the high failure rate of small entrepreneurial start-up companies, many universities set up business incubators that nurture start-ups until they are prepared to stand on their own. There are many different types of incubator, and while the evidence of their success is inconsistent, some research suggests that they do succeed in one of their primary goals because start-ups that begin in incubators have a higher survival rate (c.f. J Technol Transf 48(5):692–710, 2004) compared to non-incubator companies.

Dag Bennett

Papers

Examining retail customer experience and the moderation effect of loyalty programmes

A Three-Stage method for Data Text Mining: Using UGC in Business Intelligence Analysis

Sustainable smart cities: creating spaces for technological, social and business development

Sustainable Smart Cities

University Incubators May Be Socially Valuable, but How Effective Are They? A Case Study on Business Incubators at Universities