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There's a fatal flaw in the low-price, low-margin, high-volume strategy that multinationals have been pursuing in the bottom of the economic pyramid for the past decade: In order to cover the built-in costs of doing business among low-income customers scattered in rural villages and urban slums, penetration rates must be impractically high--often 30% or more. Erik Simanis of Cornell University's Johnson School of Management argues that companies seeking to improve the lives of the world's poor should focus on a more realistic route to profitability: They need to elevate gross margins far above the company average by pushing down variable costs and boosting the price consumers are willing to pay for a unit of product. They also need to raise the price point for a single transaction. This combination of higher margins and higher price points increases the contribution--the amount of money that goes to covering fixed and operating costs--generated from every transaction. Achieving sustainable margins in low-income markets requires a margin-boosting platform that integrates three common approaches--bundling products, offering an enabling service, and cultivating customer peer groups--into a coherent strategy. In this way, companies can launch flourishing ventures capable of transforming the lives of millions of low-income people across the developing world.

Joint ventures with local entities in developing countries can bring big rewards--but they're also rife with risk. The CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine International, which collaborates with governments, insurers, foundations, and health care companies abroad, describes several hurdles the organization has faced, along with the approaches that helped it clear them.

Research focused on Japan and America shows that a seemingly simple concept, the apology, is interpreted very differently by different cultures. Only by understanding such differences can executives use it as a tool for facilitating negotiations, resolving conflicts, and repairing trust--of increasing importance in today's global world.

Executives often complain that investors' obsession with short-term returns forces them to make decisions that are bad in the long term. New research shows that it works both ways: Companies with a short-term orientation attract investors interested in short-term time frames.

Bundling products is a time-honored practice that marketers use to boost sales. But new research shows that it can backfire--that customers will actually pay more for less.

Economists disagree over whether the U.S. can keep driving the productivity gains that lead to higher incomes. To learn whether we're on track or in trouble, we should look at the number of business starts.

Even the best-intentioned companies trip themselves up in attempts to add diversity to their leadership ranks. Here are four common ways they do so.

Urban growth projections for 2020 show a dramatic expansion of industrial corridors and population centers, predominantly in southern and eastern Asia. This map compares those projections with the landscape in 1990.

Success in business ecosystems that include well-established companies and new ventures requires collaboration and competition, a task that demands strategic thinking to leverage a firm's resources and capabilities. Strategic thinking and the entrepreneurial activities in an ecosystem influence one another in a cycle that perpetuates and even sparks innovation. These interactions vary significantly across four types of business ecosystems-Orchestra, Creative Bazaar, Jam Central, and Mod Station-and determine the success and failures of new ventures and established companies. The nature and effect of the dynamic interactions in a business ecosystem can have profound implications for organizational success.

Globalization has become an imperative and is no longer avoidable as a strategic choice for family businesses. However, globalization strategies are far from the norm among small and medium-sized family enterprises. This article reviews the main drivers for globalization, highlights the distinct characteristics of family businesses that may enhance or constrain their global expansion, and provides a framework for strategically evaluating business capabilities and global market opportunities.

A new breed of multinationals from emerging markets is appearing in many industries. Western firms are wrong to underestimate, as they often do, the competitive threat from these firms. The discussion here highlights the non-traditional competitive advantages these firms use to win at home and abroad and shows how these firms use internationalization not only to exploit competitive advantage but to bolster it. The article concludes with suggestions for how Western managers should respond to the competitive threat from emerging market multinationals.

The 21st century has brought both opportunities and challenges in our global, boundary-less world. Importantly, managers face a dynamic and interconnected international environment. As such, 21st century managers need to consider the many opportunities and threats that Web 2.0, social media, and creative consumers present and the resulting respective shifts in loci of activity, power, and value. To help managers understand this new dispensation, we propose five axioms: (1) social media are always a function of the technology, culture, and government of a particular country or context; (2) local events rarely remain local; (3) global events are likely to be (re)interpreted locally; (4) creative consumers' actions and creations are also dependent on technology, culture, and government; and (5) technology is historically dependent. At the heart of these axioms is the managerial recommendation to continually stay up to date on technology, customers, and social media. To implement this managerial recommendation, marketers must truly engage customers, embrace technology, limit the power of bureaucracy, train and invest in their employees, and inform senior management about the opportunities of social media.

Direct selling, defined as a sales channel without a fixed retail location, was built on the premise of leveraging an individual's social networks. This industry is being redirected by embracing social media; here, the challenge lies in providing the benefits of face-to-face selling, augmented by social media. An examination of the Direct Selling News 'Global 100 Top Direct Sellers' found that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the most widely employed social networks in the industry. While 76% of direct sellers utilize social media for promotional purposes, 55% use it for recruiting new distributors and 42% use it for reactive purposes. Consumers are the most popular target for social media, followed by distributors and communities. Social media has evolved as a driver of strategy, and will become even more important in the future. Improved customer relationships are developing by listening and reacting to concerns. The transparency created by social media is enhancing trust and ethical organizational cultures. Finally, consumer brand communities are emerging that increase brand value.

In today's rapidly changing and fast-paced media landscape, consumer attention is a rare and fractured commodity. Within this environment, marketing and branding must serve customers who are attending to multiple media simultaneously, while brand placement moves brands outside of advertisements and into incidental exposure. Some brands offer a strong, consistent, and focused brand identity on all consumer-facing fronts, from advertising to event promotion and retail environments. These brands can retain their effectiveness in this new media reality, as mere exposure is all that's required to activate their rich brand identity. At the same time, brand exposure effects illuminate the vast role of nonconscious attention and processing in consumer cognition and behavior. New research shows that even incidental exposure to a brand can alter consumer behavior in manners consistent with brand identity, producing effects which may persist outside of marketing contexts and occur even when the product is not purchased or consumed. These findings suggest that strong brand identities can retain effectiveness in the modern media environment, but further work is needed to explore their multi-dimensional effects on consumer life.

New product development (NPD) practitioners are keen to benchmark NPD practices because identifying any practice that is able to more efficiently and/or effectively deliver a new product could represent the difference between success and failure. A common purpose is therefore to identify NPD best practices with the expectation that companies will manifest and sustain these to augment their NPD efforts. To help in identifying such practices, we present a framework developed from prior benchmarking studies, a Delphi methodology with leading experts, and a survey involving over 300 NPD practitioners. The uniqueness of the framework lies in its ability to distinguish NPD practice across seven dimensions: Strategy, Research, Commercialization, Process, Project Climate, Company Culture, and Metrics/Performance Measurement. The framework is also unique in that across each dimension, poor NPD practices are listed as a starting point from which to improve, alongside best practices to which companies should aspire. To further assist in continuous improvement, an audit tool is derived from the framework, suggesting investigative questions that practitioners can ask to evaluate their company's NPD efforts. We conclude with general observations about NPD practice as the continued search for NPD best practice endures.

Industries like restaurants and retail, which are populated by low-wage workers, have found it hard to increase employee productivity. New technology and methods are allowing them to increase their profits by shifting more work to their best workers.

Although a participative management style usually works best, new research finds an important exception: Low-status managers, who get better ratings and results when they take charge, set the course, and tell subordinates what to do.

Conventional wisdom holds that manufacturers and retailers see little benefit from unused coupons, but new research shows that unredeemed coupons serve as advertisements to consumers. In an experiment with eight retailers, the authors analyzed campaigns involving more than 500,000 targeted coupons for items representing more than 300 brands, mailed out over a 16-month period. They found that consumers who received but did not redeem coupons still typically increased their purchases in the associated stores. If businesses realized how powerful this increased awareness could be, they would take as much care with coupons as they do with other marketing materials, striving to delight customers, not simply to close a deal.

Need an energy boost at work? Taking a short break won't revitalize you--unless you use it to do something job related and positive.

Leadership missteps are proliferating--perhaps because of the cognitive limitations of individuals. One antidote is multiple perspectives. Another is better information gathering. Gradually we are learning to tap the superior judgment of organizations.