Dr. Syed Muntasir Mamun, Director General, International Trade, Investment & Technology, ICT; Chief Innovation Officer, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh

In the long arc of time, there have been many forms of business and marketing – starting with pure and unadulterated sales to organised marketing (and sales) and then to relationships and direct-from-the-web and from mail orders to Omni-channels – as is being currently contemplated. As human societies become progressively more conscious about the underlying traits and characteristics of human actions and, consequently of human interactions, the ideas associated with business and marketing have evolved commensurately. Jung and Freud both have contributed greatly to the understanding of human buying behaviours and patterns arising thereof. But in the emergent fiasco of lifting the flood of information, there is an increasing tendency to specialise insights into specific buying behaviours into compartmentalised visions of the future. With the advent of the era of information technology and 4IR – what appears to have dropped out of focus is a comprehensive and strategic approach towards conceptualising and executing business decisions in the milieu of a wider and deeper array of the strategic sphere. Subject matter over-specialisations have contributed to a fragmentation of the business mind instead of articulating a more coherent vision in line with the foundational constructs underwriting the business environment. When we look at the more prominent failures and follies of even the more advanced markets, and the often-irrational behaviours of the markets themselves, we see a serious dearth of a deeper assessment of the foundations of the ecosystem sustaining the individual businesses or for that matter necessitating the existence of the markets themselves. Even C-Suit executives have been found to be prone towards their own verticals of the career than a more holistic appraisal and appreciation of the business environment. Especially for countries in the South – the Developing South or, for that matter, the Bottom of Pyramid (BOP), institutional voids contribute in a big way towards friction and fractionalisation of situational awareness. In these economies, tactical manoeuvres trump the strategic considerations for long-term growth and sustainable earnings. It would not be an overstatement if I said that as much as the foundational conditionalities shape the programming dispensation of the enterprises, the enterprises themselves contribute to the continued existence of those conditions. It is important that we understand the BOPs well because more than eighty percent of the human population lives in BOP markets, and the size of the market is 4.5 billion human-strong and at least US$ 5 trillion of GDP. Almost the entirety of the global physical and natural resources endowment is located in the BOP markets. The current flux-vortex of strategic uncertainties that we are experiencing in the field of international affairs, particularly with COVID-19 and the Ukraine Wars, necessitates an urgent remodelling of our focus and of our strategies to take advantage of and shield ourselves from this scenario.

Institutional voids, unmet desires and Inchoate demands delineate the nature of the BOPs. Imperfect markets and unsettled spaces offer both systemic weaknesses and ecosystem opportunities. It is important that we understand very well how these markets constitute themselves and then operate. It is important that we understand the core nature of the BOPs so that we may find a way to leverage our position in these markets.

In my book, “Blockchains: Gaming and Collusion”, I have concatenated a few attributes of the BOP markets in one place by using a PESTEL analytics. Entrenched interests, shortage of well-defined institutions, inequitable rules, rent-seeking behaviour of political-economic actors, poor systemic oversight and poor accountability, amongst others, contribute to structural vulnerabilities in the political subsystem of the Bottom of Pyramid markets. For the economic frailties experienced by BOP markets, domineering factors include, eschewed pricing, the dominance of invisible and informal networks, rising inequalities, ill-framed capital markets, deficiencies in the storage and transmutation of value, deficiencies in administrative mechanisms, and deficiencies in incubation for entrepreneurship, disconnect with financial markets, the net foreign exodus of investible capital and wealth to foreign markets, and failure of the state mechanism to contain unregulated migration both internally and externally. Feudal mindsets amongst administrative departments, distrust and mistrust of the governed, shifting and evolving boundaries, poor sanitation and hygiene, poor medical treatment facilities and the tendency of capital and political elite to migrate to advanced countries underwrite the quicksand-like behaviours of the social polity in the BOPs. The same BOPs usually demonstrate the unavailability of the latest and legal technologies, inequalities in access to technology, skill-deficient education systems, deficient mentoring and incubation, disconnect between innovations and markets, non-documentation of indigenous technology and innovation and deficiencies in the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in the greater domain of technology. Such conditions, together, lead to the observance of imperfect judicial and juridical processes, non-existent or unenforceable insurance mechanisms, uncertainties in risk assessments, poor enforcement and lack of due diligence in the legal sphere.

At a micro level, whether these are the symptoms of a BOP market or whether these are factors causing the denomination of a market as a BOP is a matter of viewpoints and timelines. Where one specific market stands at a certain and given point in time depends on the actor reading the economic cues emanating from the phenomena of productive factors and wealth-generating incomes. In spite of all of the previously mentioned characteristics, the BOPs are a US$ 5 trillion market. As Bangladesh moves into the Developing Country paradigm, we must find new products, new services and above all, new markets to capitalise on the existing and growing assets in human resources and skills – fuelled by a rich demographic dividend – so that we may augment our national capital strength in a more distributed and a more equitable manner.  Not to mention, wealth generating income is usually, if not entirely, founded in investment and expenditures associated with the act of investments.

At the macro level, the state of the art is changing fast. Business as it used to be, as it used to be, is no more. Instead, it is another era which that has commenced. While it may not be mercantile in nature, since the boundaries delineating the nation nation-states from one another are fast fading in their realization, it does not also conform to any other single or multiple theoretical structures still in vogue. At the cost of repeating ourselves, we find that the levels, the layers, the fields, and the players, if not the rules of engagement themselves, are changing fast. Governments in businesses are usually inefficient, given the that circumstantial evidence gives proof for institutional inefficiencies. However, that does not preclude the government from making substantial investments into the business sector, not only as underwriters of the last resort or facilitators of businesses and their relevant environments, but also for the actual research and development, innovation, and market support mechanisms connecting both factor markets and the consumer markets or for that matter creating the necessary mechanisms for the supply chain solutions. The rise and forking of global equity stocks into private equity varieties and also the creation of technology solutions across political superstructures, such as nations and nation nation-states, necessitate a broader discourse and a much deeper understanding of the business imperatives.

Leveraging on the potencies of the BOPs requires the adoption of a ‘Strategic Theatre’ approach towards business and marketing.  The ‘Strategic Theatre’ approach assumes that an enterprise needs to deploy a thematic mix of insights and foresights (Zenger, 2013^[1]) to create an attack vector of cross-sights to formulate its operational priorities. The ‘Strategic Theatre’ approach assumes that an enterprise needs to deploy a mix of adaptation, aggregation and arbitrage for international expansion (Ghemawat, 2011^[2]). Coupled with continued and nearly unabated adverse changes in the natural environment, adapting a Doing all these require a deep understanding  of human conditions, aspirations and ambitions of the constituent communities and their respective places in the many evolving milieus of the world. The impending possibilities of the metaverses, the deployment of Artificial General Intelligence, and eventually, technological singularity only exacerbate the necessity of such analytics for imminent survival and a plausible growth narrative.

Businesses cannot but accept that they are a product of their times and of their spaces. That is the nature of reality.

[1] Zenger, T., 2013. The Disney Recipe. Harvard Business Review. Recuperado de www. hbr. org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st (Consultado 02/12/2016).

[2] Ghemawat, P., 2011. The cosmopolitan corporation. Harvard Business Review, 89(5), pp.92-99.