Transformation through Immersion: Bringing the reality of consumers living in rapidly growing cities into GlaxoSmithKline

Mark Manning and Nick Leon

The British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline carried out an ethnographic study in the developing market to examine global healthcare challenges and R&D commercial opportunities presented by a rising urban population.

Understanding life in emerging markets and rapid-growth cities

In the next two decades most of the world's growth is expected to occur in today's emerging markets.

By 2050 it is anticipated that two-thirds of the world's population will live in urban areas. Developing countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria will have transformed their economies, gaining a larger middle class with increased purchasing power. This will create important new consumer markets, each with much more ethnic and cultural diversity than the long-established middle class markets in the West.

A WARC paper (Sinha, 2016) predicted that, over the next decade, half...

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