Marketing-Informal Market In Latin America

Marketing—Informal Market While both, the local business investment and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been strong in many parts of Latin America, it would be naïve to think about marketing in the region without thinking about the informal market/itinerate vendors or role of informality. This form of marketing has been in place for centuries and as one travels throughout Latin America one sees its pervasiveness and its impact on individuals and local economies. Generally, each city in Latin America has a central open market. Here vendors have situated themselves in positions of heavy traffic so that they can implement their daily ritual of selling, buying, negotiating and exchanging money for goods and goods for goods. This approach to

For example; in Guatemala there are two central markets one for consumables and the other for the typical goods. This is evident in the countries of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia

Not only the spontaneous vendors work with each potential buyer presenting his/her product as cheap yet important, but these are vendors who use step ladders to climb to the windows of stopped busses to make a sale (in your face market/selling again) or the ambitious vendor who boards a bus selling his/her goods and then gets off and finds another bus to do the same thing. Some ventures generate lots of sales, other are not so lucky. Day in and day out these vendors go to their businesses and to the market to sell their goods. Many of the itinerate vendors sell goods at traffic intersections, tollbooths, airports, any place they can find people. In a majority of cases the reason for such perseverance of the informal vendors relate to a need for survival. Yet a more underlying reason is due to numerous institutional requirements necessary to start a business. For most new business in Latin America it takes 67 days o register and obtain a license to conduct a business. Worldwide the general length of time to process business registration is only 14 days. Clearly this is a significant barrier. Additionally, it costs about 36.6% per capita GDP to start a business as compared to OECD countries where the cost is only 5% (Valloso,