bottom of the pyramid

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a concept in development economics and business strategy, coined by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, referring to the roughly four billion people who live on less than two dollars per day and constitute the lowest socioeconomic tier of the global income distribution; Prahalad argued that this vast population represents an underserved market of enormous aggregate purchasing power and that businesses designing affordable, appropriate products for this segment can both generate profit and alleviate poverty; the concept challenges the assumption that the poor are solely recipients of charity rather than active economic agents