The largest marketing segment that will define future markets: the poor

Harriet Rubin (Hrubin@aol.com) is a Fast Company senior writer and the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women (Doubleday, 1997) and Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition (HarperCollins, 1999). Contact Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy by email (dr.v@aravind.org), or learn more about the Aravind Eye Hospitals on the Web (www.aravind.org) fastcompany.com/magazine

Aravind has brought its market-driving vision to the world's boldest and largest marketing segment, the one that will define future markets: the poor. Dr. V.'s Perfect To-Do List. You can set the same challenges for yourself as Dr. V. does.

• Understand the deeper principles of work as well as your purpose in the game. Becoming a clear instrument of these aims is a declaration of power, and it draws resources - money and people -- to you.
• Understand the poor, and market to them. This requires more imagination than does marketing to established markets. It requires expanding beyond the smallness of the self. It requires a shift in your view of economics and market forces. Everything you do for your personal well-being adds another layer to your ego -- and in thickening it, insulates you more from perfection, happiness, and fulfillment.
• Appreciate that we are not different from the poor. We have spaces in us that are empty and ravaged. We are on the inside what the people of India are on the outside. They are materially poor; we are spiritually poor. Indians are on the outside what we are on the inside: starving for meaning, not homeless but the next worst thing -- directionless.
• Learn how to sell water by the river. If you can become market-driving, not market-driven, you can create new arenas and go on to build a legacy. When we talk about new markets, we will have to call on new abilities within ourselves. We will have to acknowledge the least-developed parts of ourselves. That means going deeper than intellectual abilities to more-profound, more-basic human attributes.
• Recognize that the great opportunity in world markets is to make a difference in the human sphere. Bring people things they can't imagine wanting. From this act, we too will be changed -- and maybe even enlightened. Dr. V. teaches that work can be a vehicle for self-transcendence.