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Buy on AmazonUpmarket buying is not only the rich trading up. Low-end consumers also choose the better version because they want to do better. When a purchase must last years, a buyer of modest means may even pay above list price to get the newest model, so it stays current for a long time.
You cannot discuss income without discussing occupation. Government policy and the kind of work people do decide whose incomes rise and whose stall. Precise income figures matter less to strategy than knowing who works where.
Marketers chase the wealthy 'cream', yet the bottom 60 per cent of people account for about 38 per cent of all consumption. Many small buyers together make 'a large army of small people who together can be giant slayers'. Winning them means sizing investments to their needs rather than ignoring them.
People with tight budgets readily pay for 'workmate' goods and services: things that help them work, learn, or climb the value scale. Paid child care in poor neighbourhoods works because it frees busy parents to chase a livelihood.
Modest-income shoppers do not want luxury, but they also refuse squalor. They want something affordable nearby, in a decent setting with some choice, 'not a hole in a shanty'.
Firms often try to serve a big, varied market by piling up many offerings, business models and systems. The better route is to learn to serve a large slice cost-effectively with one well-run approach.
Consumers in a fast-changing market skip stages and do not stay in the categories marketers expect for long. Models borrowed from older markets mislead, so firms must study buyers without preconceived notions.
Consumers' habits are often plain for anyone to see. Yet few companies actually build a strategy around what is so common. The edge goes to firms that take the obvious seriously.
In a fast-changing emerging market, what people want grows faster than what they earn. That gap, more than income itself, shapes how they spend and what they will stretch to buy.
This market is tightly connected to the rest of the world and to its ancient past at the same time. Consumers mix new global tastes with old social habits, so their buying only makes sense set within their whole lives and hopes.