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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of broadening the horizons of social marketing with a transformative approach. Through an investigation focused on the intersections of food, poverty and health, the lived experience of Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) is identified and described. This depth of insight is useful to achieve research-informed public policy and social marketing efforts.

This ethnographic research design combines shadow shopping and phenomenological interviewing. The research site is an outreach center of a south Texas food bank and the targeted sample are SNAP recipients visiting that outreach center. Audio and visual recordings along with field notes were used to document the process.

The findings are presented as two emergent themes identified as SNAP but no food and SNAP, health and food. These two themes demonstrate the intersections between food, poverty and health and effectively capture some of the complexities within these connections.

An underlying assumption of this study is the context-dependency of the findings. In focusing this research on SNAP recipients visiting an outreach center of a Texas food bank, the findings are limited to this context and this context only. Generalizability is not the goal but rather providing a depth of insight on the lived experience of food, poverty and health for impoverished consumers is the goal.

Practical implications of this paper include implications for policy implications targeting impoverished consumers. More specifically, evidence shows value in investing in SNAP rather than divesting or reducing funding.

This research demonstrates that this outreach center offers the community not only a food hub but also a social hub.

This paper demonstrates the usefulness of adopting a transformative consumer research approach for social marketing. Documentation of the lived experience of SNAP enables research-informed public policy and research-informed social marketing strategies. Broadening the horizons of social marketing with a transformative approach is, therefore, advantageous for impoverished consumers, policymakers and social marketers.

Despite having inadequate resources, highly impoverished patients tend to seek and share health information over social media groups to improve each other’s well-being. This study aims to focus on access to health-care information for such patients and aims to provide an understanding of how online health-care communities (OHCs), as transformative service mediators, can be platforms for patients with chronic and nonchronic health conditions to share their experiences in a base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) context.

A large-scale survey among 658 respondents was conducted in a very low-income country. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

A model of patients’ experience sharing (PES), motivations and consequences for health-care services are introduced and tested. The result supports the PES model for patients with chronic health conditions, showing that utilitarian, hedonic and social value dimensions directly influence PES and indirectly influence patients’ continuance intention with OHCs and patient efforts. However, a mediating effect of PES was found only between the value dimensions and patients’ efforts. A negative moderation effect of medical mistrust was found in the relationship between utilitarian value and PES for both chronic and nonchronic patient groups.

This study is a pioneering attempt to develop and test a PES model in a BOP market.

Consumers are known to repurpose products for uses other than those they were originally intended for; this paper aims to focus on an environmentally conscious form of creative consumption known as upcycling.

This conceptual paper presents and defines the consumer practice of upcycling.

The author identifies gaps in the literature regarding consumer upcycling and identifies avenues for future research and theory development.

Upcycling has considerable implications with respect to end-of-life planning for products.

This research identifies consumer upcycling as an environmentally beneficial form of creative consumption and discusses its implications for firms.

The market-based approach to catering for the poor mainly focusses on companies making profits while helping the poor enhance their lives. This concept presented the possibility of there being a ‘fortune’ to make at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) market that was an opportunity for both businesses and consumers. The notion of the BoP market has been widely studied using urban and rural contexts as distinct classifications; yet many argue that the opportunity does not in fact exist in the rural BoP markets. In this chapter the authors examine the prospects in the rural BoP in Sri Lanka through a qualitative study using insights provided by industry practitioners who operate at the BoP level. Findings show that a large percentage of the income of multinational companies is derived from rural BoP markets. Compared to the urban sector, the rural BoP market indicates relatively higher disposable income and is viewed as an attractive market segment by industry practitioners. The findings also show that rural BoP people have more resources and skills than their urban counterparts, although the former commonly have lower levels of education. Moreover, the youth segment in both the urban and rural BoP markets was found to heavily consume social media. The authors conclude their discussion by providing several key proposals for organisations looking to seize opportunities in this market.

This paper aims to provide an overview of a social marketing intervention that aimed to increase physical activity (aligned to UN SDG 3) among adolescents in Bali, Indonesia.

Three sequential phases were followed to deliver the social marketing intervention. Phrase 1 (formative research) gained insights that guided a subsequent social marketing intervention. Phase 2 (pilot intervention) gathered preliminary results, to support the development of the final intervention. Phase 3 (intervention) evaluated the effectiveness of the two-month social marketing intervention.

The results from the intervention tested in this paper identified significant behaviour change in physical activity, demonstrating the effectiveness of the intervention. Furthermore, the paper identifies which intervention inputs contribute to behaviour change and which do not.

This paper describes the outcomes from an eight-week pilot programme that aimed to increase rates of physical activity for Indonesian adolescents and provides early evidence of impact.

This study found that providing adolescents with the opportunity to play team sports increases physical activity behaviour.

There is a lot of ground that needs to be made in terms of designing programs capable of achieving impact in the Global South. The approach reported in this paper can serve as a best-practice model for researchers wanting to drive lasting behaviour change to overcome known inequities in the Global South.

The purpose of this paper is to explore recent calls to include social and environmental considerations in supply chains by analyzing the sourcing of raw materials from impoverished communities to reduce environmental impacts and social exclusion in biofuels production.

A case study methodology based on interviews and focus groups with supply chain members and other stakeholders is conducted in Brazil, a major biofuels producer and user. Two supply chain cases, fuel ethanol and biodiesel, illustrate the challenges of recent government policies and industry attempts to improve sustainability within the supply chain.

Although government and industry recognize the importance of providing opportunities for impoverished communities in biofuels supply chains, there remain considerable pressures to economize at the expense of sustainable supply chain policies. Sourcing from impoverished farmers who lack basic business knowledge, and distrust industry and government policy, compound these challenges.

While sustainability research now emphasizes the importance of considering interactions among economic, environmental, and social parameters, little is known about integrating poorly educated, impoverished farmers within supply chains. Basic business education is needed, and further research should explore entrepreneurial dynamics within impoverished communities.

Supply chain managers should acquire skills for engaging with impoverished farmers lacking formal education. Cooperatives can bridge knowledge asymmetries between buyers and suppliers, but will require support from industry if sustainable supply chain policies are to succeed.

Most sustainable supply chain scholars acknowledge the importance providing opportunities for impoverished communities, but few have explored how potential entrepreneurs from impoverished communities can participate as productive supply chain members.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss innovative consumer marketing approaches for simultaneous business success and social empowerment at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) or in subsistence marketplaces.

The paper draws from a research program comprising qualitative methods as well as case study analyses. The central aspect of the approach to this topic is that it is a bottom‐up perspective grounded in understanding consumers. The theoretical scope of the paper includes consumption, entrepreneurship, and social capital in impoverished environments.

The authors' key finding is that businesses must follow three principles for consumer marketing – deep understanding of subsistence consumer psychology, social embeddedness, and entrepreneurial empowerment.

This research has implications for theoretical and empirical advancement in the areas of structuring marketing activities, social embeddedness of marketing, and consumer policy.

This research has implications for several aspects of consumer marketing strategy. The authors categorize these under the following: marketplace research, marketplace solutions, value propositions, communications, partnerships, harnessing social capital, designing marketing structure, and evolving the marketing mindset.

This paper suggests that consumption and entrepreneurial productivity are inextricably linked in subsistence contexts with important implications for consumer marketing. The paper has value to BOP researchers and BOP business practitioners wishing to take a nuanced view to understand their markets and serve them better.

The research objective was to understand what low‐income or emerging consumers living in the Latin American region understand as value when considering retail offerings.

The methodology employed for primary research was qualitative. Six of the major markets were selected: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico. Four focus groups were conducted in each country, resulting of a total of 208 participants. Target consumers were women from the emerging socio‐economic strata (SES). Secondly, this study relies upon a wide selection of secondary research and data sources: syndicated data sources such as A.C. Nielsen; local retail associations such as ABRAS in Brazil and ANTAD in Mexico; journal and popular press articles, SES profiles and previously published, relevant consumer studies.

Rather than emphasizing their limited income, emerging consumers as a group represent a sizable market for consumer products. But they should not be addressed as a single group: peculiarities among them underline the need for further segmentation, as in higher income segments. Their needs should be better defined as basic instead of just simple, and they do not just go for the lowest prices or second brands, as they have marked preferences that characterize them. This also reflects in their shopping habits, which partly explains the resilience of the traditional/small format retailers. The findings underline these segments' relevance for consumer products, their rational behaviour as they try to reconcile their preferences with their economic reality, and how this explains their distinct set of products and format requirements.

Marketers and retailers interested in catering to lower‐income segments will find clues to understanding the preferences, habits and needs of these segments that represent a significant portion of emerging markets.

Conclusions are presented here in the form of six common myths on emerging consumers that are contradicted by the findings. The relevance of this study comes not only from the significant size of this market but also from the possibility of marketers to emphasize the social contribution of business.

The purpose of this paper is to address the apparent controversy surrounding the relevance of country of origin (CO) and brand origin (BO) lines of research, with particular reference to an article authored by Magnusson, Westjohn, and Zdravkovic (MWZ) whose research findings assert that CO matters, irrespective of whether customers can actually recall origins of brands.

Drawing on the extant literature from academic and business publications, the paper offers evidence regarding the relative unimportance of origin‐related attributes in most purchasing situations. In this context, the paper examines the atheoretic nature of CO research combined with a general lack of realistic managerial relevance, consumers’ impoverished CO and BO knowledge base, and the challenges of using CO as a positioning tool in marketing strategy. Finally, the paper examines some critical research issues regarding MWZ's contribution.

Country of origin research is not as relevant in customer choice process as some scholars believe and is generally void of meaningful managerial guidelines.

This is a commentary about an International Marketing Review article.

This chapter argues for looking into alternative domains, beyond the narrow confines of the base of the pyramid narrative, to develop a comprehensive and meaningful understanding of marginalised consumers and markets. In gaining deep and nuanced understanding of these markets and consumption behaviour, scholar may draw theoretical resources from varied disciplines such as economics, political theory, literary theory, sociology and anthropology. This chapter reviews three such scholarly perspectives on consumption and markets under poverty.