Marketing for Pro-Poor Development: Deriving Opportunities for Development from the Marketing Literature

This paper focuses on the role of marketing in pro-poor development, with a specific focus on (primary) producers of high-value products in developing countries. Marketing is an interdisciplinary field of research that, according to the authors, can make a significant contribution to pro-poor development research. Its core concepts and approaches (such as market orientation, customer value, customer satisfaction, relationship marketing, co-creation of value, marketing ethics, and institutional embeddedness) provide insights that may help advance the field of development research. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with some case examples from past and ongoing research on high-value products, including small-scale fishermen at Lake Victoria, master weavers in India and smallholder farmers of fruits and meat producing pastoralists in Africa.