1. As a junior member of your company’s committee to explore new markets you have received a memo from the chairman stating that at the next meeting be prepared to discuss key questions that need to be addressed if the company decides to look further into the possibility of marketing to the BOP segment. The ultimate goal of this meeting will be a set of general guidelines to use in developing a market strategy for any one of the company’s products to be marketed to the “aspirational poor”. These guidelines need not be company or product specific at this time. In fact, think of the final guideline as a check list—a series of questions that a company could use as a start in evaluating the potential of a specific BOP market segment for one of its products.

2. Your book's subtitle reads "eradicating poverty through profits." A rather sweeping promise, isn't it?

3. How can they afford to buy companies' goods and services?

4. That's an interesting perspective, but think about what is happening now in this country. We are trying so hard to eke out 2 to 3 percent organic growth, and most companies have tried to do acquisitions and mergers with competitors in order to get some growth. But that ends up being just a cost-cutting strategy-when you merge two operations, you can eliminate redundancies. But where is the next round of growth?

5. There's an old Indian saying that you have to have a piece of dirt to create a pearl. In other words, if you don't have the irritant, there's no pearl to be made. And you're the irritant?

6. So that's the Prahalad yardstick of democracy-an ice cream on a hot day?