Untapped: Creating Value in Underserved Markets

by John Weiser, Michele Kahane, Steve Rochlin

Underserved markets—communities made up of low- to moderate-income consumers—represent a multi-trillion dollar opportunity that has been largely ignored by most companies. With tremendous production and distribution potential, and growing workforce and supplier bases, these “base of the pyramid” markets are host to some of the fastest growing business opportunities around. They fill corporations’ most pressing increased sales, qualified workforces, reduced costs, and increased quality. Based on rigorous research on the success strategies employed by pioneering corporations, Untapped offers practical, tested tools for engaging consumers, workers, and suppliers to address the needs of both the corporation and the community.

Genres: Business

264 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2006

Reviews

[Duncan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an example of how the use of clear expository writing (with logical structure and language targeted at a broad audience) can make for an extremely boring read! The book might be interesting to real neophytes, but is very tiresome for anyone who knows a little about strategy/BOP. Their examples are boring (most are not BOP), their recommendations and frameworks are too generalized (e.g. "use partnerships"), and their anecdotes have no real meat to them. They target managers with a kind of "detailed how to" book, but keep it so generalized that it is useless in practice AND makes for a very boring read (who wants to read a manual for pleasure/intellectual challenge?). The book could be vastly improved with much better use and integration of examples -- but for this they'd need to provide much more detail than they do (all their "successes" are very ambiguous and any hard data they provide is pretty meaningless), make sure they use examples which don't become quickly dated, learn to write cases in an engaging way, and draw novel and more meaningful conclusions. All in all, its a book without soul or personality, written by committee, and will be quickly forgotten.