Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, a leader in marketing management principles, died on April 16, 2010 of a previously undiagnosed lung illness at age 68. In his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Prahalad cast the world's roughly two billion impoverished citizens not as lacking any purchasing power, but as a customer segment with unique needs for value and price. Segmentation is a foundational step in the Organic Growth Framework, and many companies followed Prahalad's guidance successfully to enter emerging markets. In one case he consulted with a global brand to produce small, individual packets of shampoo.
One of nine children, Prahalad was born in 1941 in India's southernmost state of Tamil Nadu. His father was a successful Sanskrit scholar and a judge. At age 19, Prahalad joined Union Carbide, which he later called a "major inflection point" in his life. He learned many of the poor and temporary workers wore worn gloves because the company distributed new gloves based on seniority. Prahalad appealed to management that gloves should be distributed to workers dealing with more dangerous materials instead. Impressed, management began taking notice of their young worker.
Prahalad wrote his doctoral thesis on multinational management at the Harvard Business School in 1972. He further cemented his reputation on the faculty of the Stephen Ross School of Business and as a professor at the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University. Recently he had also worked on emerging Internet and mobile technologies. Bill Gates remarked that his ideas offered an "intriguing blueprint for how to fight poverty with profitability."
C.K. Prahlad did pioneering work in recasting marketing norms and initiating innovative business models. The EMM team raises a toast to this true marketing genius. May he rest in peace.
