The worst results come from an annual gathering of global finance
managers at the headquarters of one of the world’s ten largest banks. I have
visited three of them. I can’t tell you which one this was, because I signed a
piece of paper. A roaring 85 percent of the 71
well-dressed bankers in the
room believed that a minority of the world’s children had been vaccinated. An
extremely wrong answer.
Vaccines must be kept cold all the way from the factory to the arm of the
child. They are shipped in refrigerated containers to harbors around the world,
where they get loaded into refrigerated trucks. These trucks take them to local
health clinics, where they are stored in refrigerators. These logistic
distribution paths are called cool chains. For cool chains to work, you need all
the basic infrastructure for transport, electricity, education, and health care to
be in place. This is exactly the same infrastructure needed to establish new
factories. The fact that 88 percent are vaccinated but major financial investors
believe it is only 20 percent indicates that there is a big chance they are failing
at their jobs by missing out on huge investment opportunities (probably the
most profitable ones in the fastest-growing parts of the world).
You make this kind of false assumption when you have a “them” category
in your head, into which you put the majority of humanity. What images are
you using to imagine what life is like in this category? Are you perhaps
recalling the most vivid and disturbing images from the news? I think that is
exactly what’s going on when people on Level 4
answer this badly on this
kind of fact question. The extreme deprivation we see on the news ends up
stereotyping the majority of mankind.
Every pregnancy results in roughly two years of lost menstruation. If you
are a manufacturer of menstrual pads, this is bad for business. So you ought to
know about, and be so happy about, the drop in babies per woman across the
world. You ought to know and be happy too about the growth in the number
of educated women working away from home. Because these developments
have created an exploding market for your products over the last few decades
among billions of menstruating women now living on Levels 2 and 3.
But, as I realized when I attended an internal meeting at one of the world’s
biggest
manufacturers of sanitary wear, most Western manufacturers have
completely missed this. Instead, when hunting for new customers they are
often stuck dreaming up new needs among the 300
million menstruating
women on Level 4. “What if we market an even thinner pad for bikinis? What
about pads that are invisible, to wear under Lycra? How about one pad for
each
kind of outfit, each situation, each sport? Special pads for mountain
climbers!” Ideally, all the pads are so small they need to be replaced several
times a day. But like most rich consumer markets, the basic needs are already
met, and producers fight in vain to create demand in ever-smaller segments.
Meanwhile, on Levels 2 and 3, roughly 2 billion menstruating women have
few alternatives to choose from. These women don’t wear Lycra and won’t
spend money on ultrathin pads. They demand
a low-cost pad that will be
reliable throughout the day so they don’t have to change it when they are out
at work. And when they find a product they like, they will probably stick to
that brand for their whole lives and recommend it to their daughters.
The same logic applies to many other consumer products, and I have given
hundreds of lectures to business leaders making this same point. The majority
of the world population is steadily moving up the levels. The number of
people on Level 3 will increase from two billion to four billion between now
and 2040. Almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. If you
suffer from the misconception that most of the world is still too poor to buy
anything at all, you risk missing out on the biggest economic opportunity in
world history while you use your marketing spend to push special “yoga”
pads to wealthy hipsters in the biggest cities in Europe.
Strategic business
planners need a fact-based worldview to find their future customers.
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