Let’s be clear and kind first.

Neutral reality:
For a vast majority of tiny and micro enterprises—especially women-led agri livelihoods—marketing doesn’t get planned. It gets triggered. And it usually triggers late.

Marketing shows up only when:

•    the crop is already harvested,
•    the milk has already overflowed,
•    the pickles are already bottled,
•    or the vegetables are already staring at you from the basket saying, “Ab kya?”
•    Surplus egg is there in yard when there is not one to eat it,

At that moment, the enterprise isn’t asking how to market—it is asking how to avoid loss today.

Why does this happen?

Not because people are careless. But because:

•    The surplus itself is uncertain (weather, yield, household consumption).
•    The timing of readiness is fuzzy, not calendar-based.
•    The producer doesn’t see two extra units as a “market signal.”
•    Prediction feels like “business thinking,” not “livelihood thinking.”

So marketing becomes reactive, not proactive.

Radha didn’t wake up saying, “Today I will market lauki.”

She woke up saying, “Today lauki is ready.”
Marketing entered the story accidentally.

👉 This is the Predictability Gap.

Core insight:
Marketing for micro enterprises is not triggered by intention. It is triggered by realized surplus.

My opinion (and I’ll say this at IIM volume 😄):

We must stop teaching marketing as a pre-production function for livelihoods. First, we must teach surplus anticipation, not marketing tactics. 

Prediction here doesn’t mean Excel sheets—it means mental rehearsal: “If two extra units come, who is already waiting?”