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

Abstract

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.