CS: I think there is a general shift happening in the way customers are responding to goods and products, although it's not going to happen overnight. The older and still current way of thinking is that consumers develop a kind of one-on-one relationship with a brand, and that relationship is habitual. You get the same person buying the same brand over and over again, and to be thoughtful in a very weak way – that is, you can get maybe 15 to 30 seconds of the consumers' attention to think about the brand – and you do that through packaging, advertising, company service in the community, and all the traditional ways in which people have advertised and promoted their products.

What Maria and I see happening on the Internet in first world communities, and in traditional communities in developing countries, is that the important place where a brand lives is not in the 15 seconds of attention, but in discussions that people are having about the brand. So I like to say it's lipshare instead of mindshare that you need to begin cultivating and taking care of.

You can see that this is a very, very different kind of thing for companies. It's very tricky – you can easily go wrong because these are people that really care about the brand in a serious way. That's very good news for companies – that there are going to be more and more people really caring and really thinking about your brand, and making it part of their life. But on the other hand, there is nothing simple about their relationships with such companies.

If you look at your own life, you can see that you are probably becoming more aware of online communities, of people that you respect who are evaluating goods. We like to call those people "mavens."

You can go to Amazon and find that there are mavens talking about various books that you might be interested in. You can go to Epinion. You can go to hear music and find mavens. Record companies, toy companies in particular, and other kinds of companies are becoming much more sensitive to their mavens, both in promoting and marketing products.

There is another kind of people that you tend to listen to – tastemakers. The people who are most affected by tastemakers are kids trying to be cool and living a cool life. Even if we're in our 30s, 40s and older, there are people who have roles that are admirable for us, and one way or another we imitate them and listen to them.

There are other kinds of ways in which communities are formed – Grateful Dead-like communities where there are lots of shared values. Some sports teams have that with their brand. One the one hand, we see that successful companies are paying more and more attention to the lipshare they get – cultivating it – and they are looking to the kind of communities that they need to form in order to ensure they have good lipshare, and are listening to it. This ranges all the way from consumer goods companies like Kraft and Hallmark Cards to toy companies, record companies and financial services – it's the cutting edge way of approaching customers now.

Today, the Internet enables communities: people are able to discuss what they care about and come together around topics and common goals in a way that might not have happened as easily before. But in more tight-knit communities, like the lower-income communities in Guadalajara, those kind of practices already existed in some ways.

MFL: Having communities online is new today – it's bringing people together that have been very dispersed. Charles and I have seen that lower-income communities already have a lot of practices for organizing among themselves – that's not new to them.

You could say, in some ways, that low-income communities are lead users in the area of communities, and that people in the more "First World" countries are discovering the value in something that has been around for other people for a long time. It's not an easy argument to make because generally we think of people in the First World as being the leaders in every area.

CM: So this a lesson that companies can apply to middle- and upper-income markets, thus gaining an advantage there too?

CS: It's the same skill set that companies have to develop in order to market goods online to well-off communities. Companies are learning to actually be involved in communities in a way that mass marketing had led them away from – that you need grassroots marketing; that being physically present in the community, doing things where it might seem you are not going to get a big bang for your buck right away in terms of eyeballs but you will, organically, in the long run – that kind of marketing and genuinely being present in the community is what you need in order to succeed in low-income communities. And it's what companies need to succeed in today's new marketing environment.

Understanding how to introduce goods in a way that produces word-of-mouth in a community and gets the community promoting it – that has applications in all the different markets, not just to the lower-income market. But when you talk about teaching people the value of exchange relationships, and bridging this to how they already see themselves gaining social capital in their community, then I would say that is not necessarily applicable to every community.

There is a lot that companies can learn about how to increase social capital. Helping people with their status is something that might be appreciated in other more affluent communities. But we've explored that more for the lower-income communities, especially in countries like Mexico, in Latin America, and in Bangladesh and some other areas of the world.

It gets companies dealing with communities of customers. I believe they are going to have to become sensitive to dealing with communities, not only in the developing world but in the rest of the world as it becomes more highly connected and there are more virtual communities cropping up.

The difference this brings to thinking about middle class and richer people is that normally when companies think, "How can I improve my customer relationship with my middle-class paying customers?" they think in two different domains. They think, "How can I make it more convenient for my customers to purchase and use my goods?" You can see the history of bank drive-up windows, automated tellers, telephone banking and Internet banking following that chain of reasoning.

Or they use the kind of Disney model and say, "How can I provide more delight for my customers in purchasing my goods?" So, for example, you can find television and mini-theaters in airports, better food on airplanes, and all of those kinds of things that raise the level of customer appreciation for a product.

What we are saying is that the experience that you have in the lower-income market, particularly in the developing world, is one where you are not just going down the convenience road or the delight road. You are asking, "How can I help my customers feel that they are more worthy as mothers, fathers, workers – whatever the important roles are – in using the product?" And that's a richer question. It allows for much more innovation. Ultimately, it allows a better relationship between the business and the customer than by simply saying, "How can I make it more convenient or how can I make it more delightful?"

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