Marketing is, among other things, about a bigger piece of the pie. What if there was a bigger pie? Amazingly, there is an enormous pie but it's almost completely ignored.

Globalization is hot but the real prize comes from understanding the size of the global market. To do that, business people will have to cast off misconceptions, prejudices and conventional thinking. There are six billion people in the world and no reason why every one, even those who live on a few dollars a day, should not be the target market of any sized business.

A few years ago, C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart presented a paper at a conference on sustainable development. In "Strategies for the Bottom of the Pyramid," the authors stirred the audience with a cogent description of the viability of marketing to poor people. Counterintuitive but that doesn't make it wrong.

Think of the math: in the developed world there are about a billion people. We scratch and claw for a piece of that market. By expanding horizons to the rest of the world, we no longer have to fight for another hundredth of a point of market share because we've just exploded the market by six.

But of course, goes the argument, poor people are poor, what can they buy? That depends on what you're selling. Procter and Gamble made great strides in South Asia when it realized people there want to buy, just not the all-American, jumbo-sized bottle for a week's wages. P&G sells "sachets," single-use packets that are within the budget of the average housekeeper. Same product, different shape, and bam, another billion people in your pipeline.

With easier scale comes more. Microfinance lends $50 or $100 to entrepreneurs for whom such a sum is significant. Administering small loans used to be labor intensive but software packages designed strictly for microfinance have made it much easier. Consider that 30 percent interest is a highly attractive - and honest - rate for an African small business and you can see how microfinance can be macro business. Citibank is one major investor because the market for such services is in the multiple billions. Less esoterically, the Phillippines' Smart Communications has created a system that allows cell customers to on-sell unused minutes in small increments to those who can only afford a few at a time. Talk about viral marketing.

A host of possibilities exist around the idea that the poor have needs and can pay to meet them when products are right-sized. Spend some time in an African village and you'll see money flows - to value.

It takes open thinking to see the whole world as a market. Margins may be lower in poorer countries (sometimes) but the volume potential is staggering. Baseball experts often talk about "small ball," moving runners one base at a time. Ask yourself, do you want to spend your whole life looking for a five-run homer or hit six billion bunt singles?