Bottom-Up Journey into Subsistence Marketplaces from Micro-Level Behavioral Foundations: New Directions for Public Policy and Marketing

This commentary discusses how the research on subsistence marketplaces has evolved from behavioral foundations to providing new directions in marketing and public policy, bridging multiple units of analysis. The specific insights from this stream of work are widely published and not repeated here. This research stream starts with micro-level understanding and aggregates insights from the bottom-up (Viswanathan 2013). The stream has its beginnings in understanding the problems faced by low-literate, low-income consumers in the United States (Viswanathan, Rosa, and Harris 2005; Viswanathan, Xia, et al. 2009). It then extended to understanding consumers, entrepreneurs, and marketplaces in the broad range of low income referred to as “subsistence” (i.e., barely making ends meet). Thus, the research encompasses a range of poverty in developing countries and low-income contexts in advanced economies.

Stream of Subsistence Marketplaces

Beginning at the micro level has meant understanding how consumers and entrepreneurs think, feel, cope, relate, and sustain in subsistence marketplaces. It has also meant understanding the daily life circumstances of individuals at a micro level. Staying at this level would be very much in the mode of consumer behavior. However, this stream of work covers multiple levels of analysis, from consumers to entrepreneurs, households, communities, and larger society through emphasis on consumption, entrepreneurship, product development, enterprise models, and sustainable development. Unique here is that these higher-level insights are evolved bottom-up. As such, it represents an approach that is unlike the typical compartmentalization by unit of analysis between individual, organizational, and societal levels. Thus, this stream bridges traditional compartments in the marketing discipline based on unit of analysis (i.e., the micro with the meso and macro, bottom-up).

From the outset as well, this stream has emphasized synergies between research and practice. Through envisioning and delivering marketplace literacy, this stream has embedded practice through social enterprise. More broadly, it has been characterized uniquely by symbiotic academic–social enterprise, involving sustained immersion and a mutually enriching relationship between academic research and social enterprise (Viswanathan, Baskentli, et al. 2021).

For illustrative purposes, I focus on some new directions for marketing and public policy research with emphasis on consumer, societal, and environmental well-being. First and foremost, the intersectional, interdisciplinary approach emphasizes the customer as beneficiary, bridging marketing and development. Doing so highlights the unique vantage point of the marketing discipline in providing bottom-up insights for policy and development.

Related to this broader perspective is the specific how of generating policy implications for consumer, societal, and environmental well-being. The bottom-up approach entails demonstrating a process of generating aggregated insights for policy (Viswanathan, Rosa, and Ruth 2010, 2012). A variety of processes have been created, including bottom-up immersion, emersion, and design (Viswanathan 2016). Furthermore, the importance of considering community and larger context in addition to consumer has been emphasized. The importance of looking beyond consumer wants to aspirations is another notable aspect. In settings where products need to bring improved life circumstances (i.e., enhanced consumer well-being), and where markets blur into the social milieu, the notion of doing good as a way of doing well has been articulated. However, future research should focus on evolving the bottom-up approach to marketing and public policy to enhance all facets of well-being. How can the bottom-up approach be evolved in light of unique insights that are tied to distinctly different contexts, while aggregating to achieve some efficiencies or scale?

A unique educational social enterprise is worth noting: marketplace literacy (Viswanathan, Sridharan, Gau, et al. 2009; Viswanathan, Umashankar, et al. 2021). Development efforts and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals typically emphasize livelihoods and economics. A marketplace perspective emphasizes buyers, sellers, and beyond. Marketplace literacy is about more than livelihoods, emphasizing know-why about marketplaces, encompassing consumer, entrepreneurial, and sustainability literacy. Marketing and public policy has much to add with greater specificity or granularity than a purely economic perspective would allow. Marketplace literacy, which is mostly marketing literacy, is fundamental to development.

Examples of Future Research

Next, I discuss some specific directions for future research on consumer, societal, and environmental well-being for illustrative purposes. A bottom-up perspective would counterbalance a top-down view of sustainability. Thus, the emphasis would be on what consumers in a variety of contexts are trying to sustain, be it language, culture, or livelihood. To survive, relate, and grow are three important facets of bottom-up sustainability in subsistence marketplaces. More generally, consumers’ aspirations and the meanings they strive for and value in their lives are central to bottom-up perspectives on sustainability. Indeed, for those with deprivation on multiple fronts, a seemingly narrow opportunity, such as gaining marketplace literacy or starting a small enterprise, can be the lever for enhancing well-being. In this regard, research has shown how marketplace literacy can enhance personal well-being, consumer decision making and self-confidence, and entrepreneurial intentions and startups.

A bottom-up perspective to consumer, societal, and environmental well-being would begin by understanding the unique impact of climate change and environmental degradation locally and regionally. Such an approach would privilege ground-level reality and policy implications that are customized accordingly. With the effects of climate change very much in the present tense, a bottom-up approach to environmental well-being would focus on consumers and consumption in different settings in light of current and projected environmental impacts. For instance, research has illustrated how symbiotic academic–social enterprise unfolds in light of unique climate change issues faced by communities in Tanzania and how sustainability education can be customized for them (Viswanathan, Baskentli, et al. 2021).

Fundamental to development from this perspective are forms of marketplace literacy. For instance, future research and practice should focus on health-related marketplace literacy. This is a unique domain of particular complexity for those with low income and low literacy. Consumer, entrepreneurial, and sustainability literacy in the domain of health care is of paramount importance in these settings. Similarly, small farmers and agricultural laborers would benefit from agricultural marketplace literacy. The tensions between forms of sustainability play out in everyday life. Marketplace (marketing) literacy in such domains and others is an important arena for future research. Financial literacy construed beyond personal finance to include the marketplace is another arena relevant to marketing and public policy.

The journey into subsistence marketplaces elucidates the importance of access in different forms including physical and digital. From urban to semi-urban to rural and isolated tribal areas, reality on the ground highlights the role of access in a variety of realms of life, such as access to essential goods and services, including education and health care. Ways of enabling access may come with the benefits of exposure and marketplace literacy. Marketing and public policy needs to bring a renewed focus to this important factor.

Finally, consumer behavior research can benefit greatly from the subsistence marketplaces stream. A search of keywords in consumer research journals points to the considerable potential to examine topics of central importance in consumer behavior (Chakravarti 2006; Hill 2020; Viswanathan and Lalwani 2020; Viswanathan, Xia, et al. 2009) as well as the need to understand macro-level empirical findings in terms of underlying behavioral processes (Martin and Hill 2013; Talukdar 2008). Most work in consumer behavior and some affiliated disciplines, such as psychology, has occurred in relatively resource-rich settings. Methodologically, this stream expands the scope of both qualitative and quantitative research, emphasizing such approaches as field experiments. Substantively, much work, particularly in quantitative areas of consumer behavior, has focused on consumers with relatively higher levels of income and literacy. Expanding theories to low-income settings can stretch levels of variables such as resource constraints or education levels to their extreme as well as bring in new constellations of variables. Consider construal-level theory in consumer behavior, wherein the ability to think abstractly is assumed. Yet even this assumption does not hold in several contexts I have studied. Indeed, I have argued for the notion of a cognitive survivor rather than a cognitive miser.

Conclusion

The subsistence marketplaces approach takes the promise of marketing to its logical extreme in pushing the boundaries of being bottom-up and rooted in understanding the customer. When overlaid with the lens of doing good and doing good well, this approach provides perspective on what is good to begin with and how it can be engendered. Thus, bottom-up insights disabuse us of notions of what seems good or feels good from a top-down perspective. Also relevant here are the dangers and pitfalls of supposed good. Indeed, doing good well requires the bottom-up counterpoint to the more traditional top-down vantage point. In closing, the subsistence marketplaces stream of work bridges levels of analysis as well as marketing and development and offers new directions for research in marketing and public policy. It diversifies our endeavors and includes those most vulnerable, as we strive toward a more equitable world.