What about poor clients?

What about poor clients? When companies get involved

Henri de Reboul and Olivia Verger-Lisicki

What type of practices can create value for poor clients and companies? Which partners can support them? What are the issues and prospects? This book aims to answer the key questions that many companies are asking on this issue. It also seeks to answer the questions of all those outside the corporate world who try to understand why and how private sector interests and those of society can converge.

Selling products and service to poor populations… The idea would seem questionable from a social point of view (would we not be exploiting poverty?) and from an economic point of view (does a market really exist?). And yet… This book shows that “doing business” with poor populations may benefit all if the process is tailored to the constraints and needs of everyone.

Danone and Grameen in Bangladesh, Essilor in the optics market in India, La Poste vis-à-vis poor clients in France… This book tells us the stories of companies that have set out on this adventure: their initial motives, their difficulties and solutions in meeting the needs of poor clients. The lessons they have learned from their experience are made available to all companies and their partners who want to take this path of innovation.
Beyond individual stories, the book puts the conditions for improving and scaling up this movement to help the poor into perspective via insight from experts in combating poverty.

This book was written by Henri de Reboul and Olivia Verger-Lisicki from IMS-Entreprendre pour la Cité, a business association engaged in societal responsibility processes. It has received the support of five companies that opened their doors: AXA, Bristol-Myers Squibb, La Poste, Orange-France Télécom, GDF SUEZ. It is also the fruit of two years of studies on corporate practices in terms of poor clients, and intercorporate exchanges on the topic with public actors, associations and academics.

IMS-Entreprendre pour la Cité was created in 1986. It operates via a network of 200 companies which it supports in their Societal Commitment processes. The association helps companies to develop initiatives that create value in the areas where they are established and to build greater social equity: access to products and services for populations in difficulty, support for local social-economic development, solidarity partnerships, integration of publics that may be discriminated against (particularly in difficult neighbourhoods), promotion of non-discrimination and management of diversity.

Order the publication