Anectdotal Evidence and Creating more "Effective" BoP Markets

Many social impact enterprises use anecdotes as evidence of their success, or to illuminate the annual milestones and achievements. As evidence by Ted London in his piece "Making Better Investments at the Base of the Pyramid", anecdotal evidence is limited in its scope and ability to measure the full impact of a social impact enterprise. He argues that social enterprises should strive to take account of the whole picture to evaluate both the 'major and minor effects" of an enterprises impact.

I agree with London, here and combined Geoff Mulgans argument stressing the need to begin to examine the areas where we can build "effective supply and demand social impact markets," anecdotal evidence could better be used to engage producers and consumers in the BoP market. "Effective demand means that someone is willing to pay for a service or an outcome. That 'someone' may be a public agency, a foundation, or individual citizens. Effective supply means that the service or outcome works, is affordable, and is implementable" declares Mulgans. I find that often times social impact enterprise fail to engage their constituents when promoting their success, using most of their marketing resources to attract new investors. Why not treat the constituent like an investor, where educating the constituents--really consumers-- would create greater network externalities for the enterprise itself. This approach has the potential to limit the need for in hiring members of the community to promote and educated benefits of that advantage of the products/services provided by the enterprise. The more consumers the greater the profit margin and ability to scale. Now its never that simple, but enterprises should not fail to see the power of the anecdote to attract new consumers. Not to mention its likely to be less expensive than initiating a traditional marketing campaign, involving focus groups, production teams and the like. I truly believe this approach will help to broader social markets of increasing the demand and supply all together.