Serving the invisible poor: Segmenting the market

Abstract The United Nations definition of the poor based on the 2 U$D/day income hides other forms of poverty. The sociological literature has argued the multidimensional nature of poverty and, within management and marketing, the macromarketing and bottom/base of the pyramid literature have suggested the need to look beyond income. From this broader perspective we will argue that poverty affects a larger section of the population that we normally do not account for. These are the invisible poor border lower income middle class consumers. This implies that there is high heterogeneity among the poor and calls for a categorization. In this paper we make two contributions to the extant literature. First, we provide a novel classification; we identify a set of geographical-social-economic dimensions that explain this variability. Second, by adopting the “4A’s” framework, we help managers to make a distinction between the different type of poor with regards to their level of awareness, acceptability, accessibility and affordability, for different value propositions.