from wall st journal: Around the world, four billion people live in poverty. And Western companies are struggling to turn them into customers.
For the past decade, business visionaries have argued that these people, dubbed the Base of the Pyramid, make up an enormous, untapped market. Some of the world's biggest, savviest corporations have aimed to address their basic needs—by selling them everything from clean water to electricity.
But, time and again, the initiatives have quietly fizzled out. Why? Because these companies were looking at it all wrong.
Put most simply: The Base of the Pyramid is not actually a market. True, those billions of low-income people have a lot in common. But they don't have two of the vital characteristics you need to have a consumer market. They haven't been conditioned to think that the products being offered are something one would even buy. And they haven't adapted their behaviors and budgets to fit the products into their lives. A consumer market is nothing less than a lifestyle built around a product.
Think of an example close to home. In the 1970s, bottled water was a foreign idea to most Americans—it wasn't part of American consumers' lifestyle. It took decades for large numbers of consumers to accept the notion of buying something you could get free out of a faucet—and turn bottled water into a big business. For many poor consumers, paying for clean water or sanitation products seems just as outlandish.
The answer? Companies must create markets—new lifestyles—among poor consumers. They must make the idea of paying money for the products seem natural, and they must induce consumers to fit those goods into their long-held routines...
One final thought: When marketing to the Base of the Pyramid, companies should be positive. Instead of telling consumers that a product will alleviate their hardships, companies should stress how the product will make their lives more enjoyable.
2 deaths result from wal-mart stampede from nydailynews: A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said. The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m. Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him. “He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too… I literally had to fight people off my back.”
guns go tax-free for south carolina shoppers on black friday from ap: TVs and laptops won't be the only hot items in South Carolina this Black Friday. The state is offering an unusual perk to shoppers: no sales tax on handguns, rifles and shotguns. The so-called "Second Amendment Weekend" is thanks to a little-debated amendment legislators tacked on this summer to a tax break for energy-efficient appliances. While the energy-efficiency measure doesn't go into effect until next year, on Friday and Saturday gun buyers won't have to pay state and local sales taxes that can total 8 percent. Taxes still apply to ammunition and accessories. "We are a gun-owning-tradition state, a hunting-tradition state," said Republican state Rep. Mike Pitts, a retired police officer who introduced the proposal and has promoted other pro-gun legislation. "Quite often people will buy their pop or grandpop a shotgun or rifle to hunt with for Christmas," he said in an interview by cell phone while out hunting.
2 killed in US toy store shooting from dpa: Two people were shot to death Friday in a southern California Toys R Us after an argument between rival shoppers escalated into a shooting, police said. The incident occurred in the city of Palm Desert, some 200 kilometres southeast of California, on so-called Black Friday, the day the US retail industry kicks off its biggest shopping period before Christmas with huge discounts and bargains. Initial reports were that two women were fighting and swearing and that gunfire erupted when two employees tried to break up the fight. Witnesses told the Los Angeles Times that both women involved were accompanied by men, one of whom drew a gun and shot in the air before shooting the other man in the back.
from jersey journal: Crass commercialism of the holidays isn't new. But it may have reached a new low at a Bayonne dollar store that offers a game that exploits one of the worst tragedies in the history of the United States.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, where more than 2,600 people were killed, has been reduced to a 99-cent hand-held video game in which President Bush fights al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden. It is being sold at the 99-Cent Depot, in the Twin City shopping center on Garfield Avenue.
The packaging of the game console, which features "Bush vs. Laden" and three other games, includes an anti-Semitic caricature of Bush as a white bird holding an assault rifle opposite a smiling bin Laden holding an airplane in one hand and a bomb in the other.
The packaging also depicts Bush and bin Laden as cartoon boxers. "It is so funny let's play together," reads the package, which also has images of the World Trade Center, the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan and the U.S. Capitol...
Ironically, the game, which the package says was made in China, was on a shelf near "Support the Troops" stickers.
from raw story: With Americans expected to spend about almost $500 billion this Christmas, ABC's 'Nightline' takes a closer look at one man trying spread the message that America is being crushed under the weight of consumerism.
"We're proceeding into the shopping season under an enormous misunderstanding. We think we are consumers at Christmas time," shouted the flamboyant Rev. Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping. "No, we are being consumed!"
Talen is an activist and performance artist who's made his presence known at malls and chain stores in New York City. His efforts to halt what he and his followers call the "shopocalypse" have been chronicled in a new documentary, 'What Would Jesus Buy?' In the film, Talen is shown being kicked out of a Starbucks, performing an exorcism at Wal-Mart headquarters, and getting arrested in front of a Disney store.
"I think the commercial Christmas has become the Grinch," says Talen. "Polls indicate that most Americans now think of Christmas with dread rather than happy anticipation, and that's sad."
from the independent: He's stormed everywhere from Starbucks to the Capitol preaching his gospel of Stop Shopping. As Morgan Spurlock brings the unorthodox anti-capitalist's message to the world, David Usborne is granted an audience with the Reverend Billy...
If you have ever seen the Rev, it is unlikely you will have forgotten him. Perhaps it was in one of the two Starbucks branches one block from one another in the St Mark's neighbourhood of the East Village, or any Victoria's Secret franchise or Disney Store in New York. They are all favourite targets.
He will have made his way to the cashier's desk and begun one of his favourite "actions" - a laying of hands on the till followed by an exorcism. Or, if it was Starbucks, he and members of his choir - he has one, and they can raise the roof - perhaps began chanting the chain's name. Something even as simple as that always works a treat, sending the manager into a tizzy and the punters out the door.
For a man who began his performing career in Los Angeles 30 years ago as a street poet, Talen has in recent years turned himself into a pulpit-thumping, police-defying, hallelujah-baying phenomenon. He looks like an Elvis impersonator with blond hair, brandishing a Bible instead of a guitar.
He means to save us from what he calls the impending Shopocalypse, a time in America, and maybe it is upon us in Britain too, when community is supplanted by shopping malls, where real spirituality is replaced by the worship of the credit card and where freedom - that thing that George Bush boasts about - is perverted by our enslavement to the addiction of buying.
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airport screening still a pain, fliers complain* 
