Developing Customer Solutions for Subsistence Marketplaces in Emerging Economies: a Bottom–Up 3C (Customer, Community, and Context) Approach

This article demonstrates why and how bottom–up understanding and local collaboration can enable outside entities to design context-sensitive solutions in subsistence marketplaces in emerging markets. Using the literature, we argue that external entities need to understand subsistence marketplaces from the bottom–up in terms of customers/consumers, communities, and the larger context. In turn, they should design context-sensitive core solutions that involve a true collaboration with the preexisting entrepreneurial ecosystem. We use a case study where the first author had direct involvement in implementation to abstract generalizable insights and further assess our arguments with two other case studies from a different organizational context. We draw on these insights to derive implications for marketing management in subsistence marketplaces.