bottom of pyramid(new or old)

We hear more and more companies in India talking about targeting people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). In a nutshell, its concept termed by Professor C.K. Prahalad that defines people living on less than 100 rupees a day and when you sum their buying power it’s actually quite large.
This idea of targeting the BoP maybe a decade old idea, but then I realized there are people that have been targeting this demo graph for decades – political people. And they have successfully sold people on a vision and hope for years and do it quite well. If a case study should be done on the political entities that have been targeting the BoP. Some of their tactics are probably not for business studies, but I do believe there might be a couple things that could be picked up from them and implemented.