Cristiano Flores e Silva

Cristiano Flores e Silva holds a master's double degree in Business Administration from Insper (Sao Paulo) and NOVA SBE (Lisbon), with a certificate in Logistics and Supply Chain Management (GCLOG) from MIT. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. In the last years, he has been conducting research focused on the logistics of transportation of goods to retail in emerging markets, an area in which he has professional experience.

Delivering products within Brazilian slums are not an easy task. High concentration of households without formal urbanization imposes hurdles to find and access a specific location. Therefore, firms may craft different selling and distribution strategies to address this public and some firms may even refrain from catering to populations in those high-cost areas. But while the vast majority of corporations have seen these challenges as insurmountable barriers, other (CPG manufactures) have quietly pursued strategies of experimentation in developing unique product and service propositions for some of the world’s most needy consumers. Although the economic theory might suggest that a more efficient modern retail (convenience stores, supermarkets) strategy always benefits society as a whole, the social appeal of the traditional retail channel/nanostores (small family-operated stores) ecosystem cannot be ignored and is particularly a role to success in serving the BoP market.

To achieve this objective, Cristiano wants to build a true understanding of the customer’s dimensions that drive sales in the traditional retail channel in the Brazilian slums, while at the same time grasping the nanostores owners’ perceptions about BoP market behavior they usually serve.

Thus the methodology strategy relies on a choice-based conjoint (CBC) design. By doing so, BoP customers repeatedly are presented with a menu of different attribute bundles (accessibility, payment option, familiarity, and price). They are asked to select their most preferred nanostore option to buy a particular product. Moreover, the CBC approach will allow that Cristiano can simultaneously uncover actual consumer preferences for nanostore channel dimensions (e.g., price, and proximity) and the nature and degree of the knowledge that nanostores owners’ have towards these preferences in the BoP market.