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A literature review on entrepreneurship at the Base-of-the-Pyrami...

A literature review on entrepreneurship at the Base-of-the-Pyramid: how B2B entrepreneurs make a difference in customer communication and CRM

Entrepreneurial activities provide impoverished individuals with opportunities for participation by means of employment, education, capacity and business building. This literature review focuses on the domain of entrepreneurial activities at the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the business to business (B2B) context consolidating recent publications at the intersection of entrepreneurship and BoP. With the progress in alleviating extreme poverty, a new type of entrepreneurial business activities emerges. More than four billion individuals are living in miserable conditions but are extending consumption by adopting Westernized role models. Considering the business environment taking the perspective of entrepreneurs living in a BoP environment, customer communication and CRM turn out to be main marketing challenges. Further, market access is one of the main barriers to impoverished individuals’ participation in market-driven environments. For traditional marketing organizations, it is a challenge to communicate with and sell to illiterate customers who live in rural areas without proper infrastructures, such as transportation and shopping facilities (Tasavori, Zaefarian, and Ghauri 2015). Notably, entrepreneurial B2B opportunities arise from the fact that marketing approaches are often hard to establish and implement (Anderson, Markides, and Kupp 2010; Raab, Zulauf, and Wagner 2017). This literature review on entrepreneurship at the BoP reveals how B2B entrepreneurs make a difference in customer communication and customer relationship management (CRM).