6. Conclusion and directions for future research
Many western businesses are now keenly interested in assessing and exploiting the market potential of rapidly transforming emerging markets. Conventional approaches that consider a country as a whole are mostly utilized for identifying opportunities. They are useful for revealing the overall potential of a country. However, they fail to provide accurate insights on which part of a national market offers the greatest potential regarding middle class. We advocate that there is a need for a finer analysis with a particular focus on such urban locations as city, region, town, province, state, and so on within a country. The principal rationale of our argument for urban-centric market segmentation is the diversity within large emerging economies fostered by ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, languages, infrastructure, and so on. A second reason is increasing government initiatives for positioning urban areas as centers of excellence. Such efforts aim to create human capital, industrial hubs, as discussed in Michael Porter’s Diamond Model, innovation centers, and transportation hubs. A final rationale is the availability of data that enable to calculate middle class potential in different types of urban areas within a country.
