ABSTRACT
Initial efforts by MNCs to find ‘the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ (Prahalad 2004) followed traditional market notions in which companies are autonomous in the design and manufacture of goods/services and customers remain just end users (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). This is a typical firm-centric view of the market, which considers customers purely as the last link of the value creation process. The two sides of the economic equation-producer and consumerremain distinct and the only connection between them is represented by measures of customer satisfaction and customer relationship management, none of which allow consumers to actively participate in the production process. In terms of a strategy for poverty alleviation, a marked distinction between producer and consumer keeps the end user outside the firm’s boundaries and does not enhance co-creation experiences. In this conceptualisation, selling new products makes poor communities even more dependent on the producer.
