Paper info

Is Customer Relationship Management a Useful Approach to Tapping the Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP)?

Richard Fletcher and Tendai Chikweche

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a relatively new concept that has as its focus a customer centric business culture. More recently its focus has been on the need for the firm to tap into social community networks as a means of developing and managing relationships with customers. Whilst the CRM approach has been applied in Western developed country markets, to date there is no evidence in the literature to establish its application and relevance in emerging markets especially those at the Bottom of the Pyramid(BOP) segment where two thirds of the world's population are to be found. This paper illustrates that CRM has the potential to tap the BOP segment because social networks at the BOP are a means of coping with the problems of existence such as economic and politically induced shocks, infrastructure inadequacies, absence of the rule of law, endemic corruption and intermittent availability of goods. In these circumstances firms need to manage relationships with these social networks in order to both inform and get goods to customers. The results of the study also show that at the BOP, networks are important in the B2C context.