Producers of mass consumer goods – from cosmetics and garments to perishables and more – create platforms over which they tend to have limited control. This happens because they often outsource a large portion of the products’ marketing and/or final distribution to local agents. In the scaling up and effectiveness of these platforms, women play an essential role, not only as customers, but also as sellers. Saleswomen reap extensive informal knowledge about the purchasing power and reliability of the target market.
In spite of these platforms’ reach and capillarity, the information collected tends to be relatively weak, because of the difficulties involved in collection and tabulation. Since sales transactions tend to be much less frequent or irregular than those with, for example, utility firms, they provide a far less detailed picture of the customer. On the upside, saleswomen’s "soft" information can be potentially very valuable, since it may include fundamental insights about the needs, reliability and constraints of possible customers.
Some mass consumer firms offer the option to buy in installments, effectively offering microloans to their customers. This allows the platforms to develop household payment histories and thus have a better sense of the reliability of each customer. In general, the best fitting firms in these cases will be able to provide expert financial services to help to overcome the financial constraints of majority markets. Alternatively, incoming firms may offer products that are complementary to the ones that are already being sold or that are geared towards the same group of people. For example, if the platform already sells female beauty products, an appropriate and attractive addition might be products related to basic health care. This platform is also ideal for educational purposes, since it is based on face-to-face contact and depends on mutual trust between seller and buyer.
A version of this posting, co-authored with Manuel Bueno, was published on the NextBillion blog.
