The First Move in Market Shaping: Assembling Your Buying Club

The First Move in Market Shaping: Assembling Your Buying Club

After five guest interviews packed with insights, host Inder Singh takes a step back to explore a key concept in market shaping—and what is often the first move. Across the interviews this season, regardless of sector, the first move has been remarkably consistent: effective market shaping begins by building, aggregating, and harmonizing demand to create buying power. And the organizations we've spoken with have done this through a "buying club." A buying club brings together buyers who are each too small to matter on their own, aligns their interests, and turns them into something the market has to respond to. In this episode, Inder breaks down why forming a buying club is often the first step in effective market shaping, and how to do it well. The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. [https://university.fm/] EPISODE QUOTES: Buying power isn't just about finding buyers 06:52: Buying power isn't just about finding buyers. It's about getting three specific things. First, you need buyers who want the same thing . Every buyer has slightly different preferences, different specifications, different features or functionalities they want. The work is getting them aligned around a shared target, specific enough that a supplier knows what to build. Why do markets still get stuck even with real demand? 09:19: Building, aggregating, and harmonizing demand, often through a buying club, is just the first move. It's not the last one. Because even when you've done all that work, even when the demand is real, even when you've aligned the buyers, markets can still get stuck The power of a buying club 08:46: Without proof that real buyers with real budgets were in the room, the negotiation would have never happened. And the tool that does all of this is a buying club. I know that sounds a little ridiculous. It sounds like getting discounted mayonnaise at Costco. But in practice, it can be enormously powerful. It takes buyers who are each too small to matter on their own and turns them into something the market has to respond to. CHAI called theirs a buying consortium. Kim Carnahan at the Center for Green Market Activation calls hers a buyer alliance. Rich Powell's organization is literally called the Clean Energy Buyers Association. These are different words but the same concept. SHOW LINKS:  * Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) [https://www.clintonhealthaccess.org/] * Clean Energy Buyer’s Association (CEBA) [https://ceba.org/] * Center for Green Market Activation (GMA) [https://gmacenter.org/] * Cascade Climate [https://cascadeclimate.org/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Decarbonizing The Hardest to Decarbonize Sectors with Kim Carnahan

Let’s say a company has set an ambitious climate goal to drastically reduce their carbon emissions, but in order for them to meet that goal, they would need their supplier two or three links up the chain to clean up their own footprint. If the company has no relationship to this supplier and no influence over how they do business, how does the company get that supplier to reduce their emissions? That’s where Kim Carnahan and the Center for Green Market Activation come in. At GMA, Carnahan is working to decarbonize the hardest to decarbonize sectors including, aviation, maritime, trucking, and cement and concrete. GMA finds companies like the one described above and orchestrates procurement deals on their behalf with decarbonized suppliers.  On this episode, she joins host Inder Singh to break down the market-shaping tactics GMA is using to create and accelerate a greener market in the heavy industry and transport sectors. They go over the importance of aggregating demand through buyers’ alliances, how to build trust across buyers and suppliers in a nascent market, and the ways they’re incentivizing suppliers to innovate towards greener technologies.  The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. [https://university.fm/] This interview was recorded in June 2025. EPISODE QUOTES: Climate ambition requires market expertise Most of the companies that we're working with are trying to decarbonize sectors that they don't actually work in. You know, they're a bank, but they fly a lot. And what they have found is, one, in almost all cases, the bulk of the emissions from the good they are buying don't lie with the supplier they buy it from. They lie three or four steps down the value chain to a supplier they have never met and certainly do not have a contract with. You very quickly faced this problem of influence, which is, does your supplier even have enough influence on the next guy to tell him anything? We had to find a way to connect the buyers with a willingness to pay a premium with the suppliers who actually need to be doing the hard, hard work of decarbonizing heavy industry and transport. You need something like this book and claim system that we design to help the money find its cause, so to speak. Markets don't shape themselves 26:23: Markets don't shape themselves; it's probably a naive idea that markets shape themselves, but really, behind every functioning market is infrastructure. And that's rules and laws and standards and registries and demand signals like what we're doing, and government policy, various incentives. Somebody had to put all of those in place and maintain them also over time. Altruism is not going to create green markets 27:02: Altruism is not going to create green markets. We aren't going to have green markets because we should have them, or because the planet needs it. We have to really look at risk and rewards, incentives, influence. That's what makes companies take action. So, use what you've got, where is their influence and where can we drive the creation of green markets. SHOW LINKS:  * Kim Carnahan | LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimcarnahan/] * The Center for Green Market Activation [https://gmacenter.org/news/person/kim-carnahan/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harnessing Corporate Power for Clean Energy, with Rich Powell

What if the best chance we have at creating a green energy future rests in the hands of the free markets?  Rich Powell is the CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), a group that consists of some of the largest buyers of electricity in the U.S. and across the globe. By leveraging the collective buying power of its members, CEBA is  creating low-cost, reliable, carbon emissions-free systems, and reshaping energy markets globally.  Powell joins host Inder Singh to discuss how capitalism can be wielded to fuel environmental progress, AI’s influence and impact on the acceleration of clean energy solutions, and the innovative levers CEBA is pulling to shift markets towards a more sustainable future.  The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. [https://university.fm/] This interview was recorded in May 2025.   EPISODE QUOTES: Capitalism lifts people from poverty and drives the path to a cleaner world 03:01: I am a capitalist and a proud capitalist. I don't think I have to spend a lot of time defending capitalism's record on lifting people out of poverty and making economies that are wealthy enough to start to really worry about the second-order problems of environmental quality and then the third-order problems. I've actually spent, through some of my previous experiences, a fair amount of time in post-Soviet situations, and I have seen the utter environmental devastation that centrally planned economies can wreak on their environments and on their populations. So, I've seen real environmental injustice in those places. And so, I do think that capitalism is the force that it has and continues to lift people around the world out of poverty. And that's going to enable us to afford the things we'll need to do to go all the rest of the way, to achieve a global economy that's ultimately clean. How corporate demand is driving clean energy innovation 38:15: You've got a situation now where electricity demand growth is being driven by a number of companies that are really interested in doing it with low-carbon or carbon-free power, that have strong commitments in that regard, and that have, obviously, for everything we just discussed, very large balance sheets and a willingness to kind of take on, in many cases, higher technology risk in supplying those operations than maybe your average, consumer-serving utility would be. And so, that's driving some really cool innovation in this space. From three companies to a nationwide clean energy movement 26:11: This is kind of wild to think, so only 13 years ago, only three companies had voluntarily transacted renewable electricity in the United States, and that was Walmart and Google, and General Motors…[27:05] And going from those three companies today, we've had 235 companies in the U.S. that have transacted some volume in some way of clean electricity. And we've gone from a couple dozen megawatts to now 100 gigawatts. So, that's like three orders of magnitude up from those early purchases, which is really exciting… [10:15]: And if you take that 100 gigawatts, so like what we've contracted for so far, and you were to compare that by capacity to U.S. states, we're the largest state. California, for example, that has a commitment to going 100% clean is a smaller total capacity than that figure. It's like we've created another state that's moving faster than the rest of the states and is actually growing. We're just getting started.   SHOW LINKS:  * Clean Energy Buyers Association [https://cebuyers.org/] * Enough Red Tape – We Need To Say Yes to Clean Energy | Rich Powell | TED [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku1ht_ZAU-w] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Driving Down the Price of Critical Medicines, with Dr. David Ripin

Dr. David Ripin, the Chief Scientific Officer at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) joins host Inder Singh to discuss a watershed market shaping effort: the price reduction of a key drug, tenofovir. This price reduction helped shift and scale treatment for millions of people living with HIV/AIDS. Today, Tenofovir is used by 30M people globally. But when it was first introduced, it was more expensive than the entire three drug cocktail used at the time, and global leaders argued it should NOT be deployed in developing countries because budgets could not stretch far enough. What happened next changed that. CHAI and its partners drove the price down nearly 60% in under four years, helping unlock widespread adoption. Its price today is more than 80% lower than when it was first introduced.  David and Inder discuss the approaches and tactics that enabled these massive price reductions.  The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. [https://university.fm/] This interview was recorded in April 2025.    EPISODE QUOTES: On disrupting the equilibrium 15:32: While all of this sounds fairly basic and intuitive, there's a lot of work back there. And because all of these companies are focused on introducing the next drug in, at some point you get into a market situation where you have a local equilibrium.  16:11: The water could be downhill, it would be happier downhill, but the water doesn't know that, right? The water is in this mountain peak, and it's perfectly content there. And it takes someone coming along and drilling a hole to disrupt that market and then reset it so that everyone realizes, oh, okay, the water needs to be down there now—or let's call it what it is, the price. And so, that's really what we had to undertake when we were focused on lowering the costs of Tenofovir. Access is the real innovation 32:33: You could cure cancer, but if you do it in a way that no one can afford, you still have a problem.  Why competition can move markets forward 17:43:  Let's say you have a mark and you have two or three companies. They've developed a drug. They've spent a lot of money doing it. They're generally competing. They're basically the same technology as each other. So, their costs are comparable. They're going to come to a relatively stable pricing level. Now, you know, the other thing to remember is this absolutely massive generic drug market. Twenty-five million to thirty million people are taking the same drug once a day, every day, for their entire lives. And represents a massive business opportunity. So if I'm supplier number four—you know, I'm the next supplier, and I'm looking at this market, it looks really attractive to me. I want in. But I already, you know, see three guys have market share. It's hard to come in...[19:37] So, if I can incorporate changes that get me a cheaper starting material or a more efficient process before I spend money the first time to develop this drug, I'm going to come into the market with a market advantage. I'm going to disrupt that equilibrium.    SHOW LINKS:  * Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) [https://www.clintonhealthaccess.org/] * Optimizing the Manufacture, Formulation, and Dose of Antiretroviral Drugs [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(12)70134-2/abstract] (or here [https://marketbookshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/PIIS1473309912701342.pdf] for the full article) * Healthy Markets for Global Health: A Market Shaping Primer [https://beamexchange.org/media/filer_public/81/ca/81cab098-53c1-4f04-a02b-d15530edb26e/healthymarkets_primer.pdf] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Art of the Market Shaping Deal, with Alan Staple

Market Shaping can feel a bit like Mission Impossible sometimes. How are you going to get all these groups across the world, with different incentives and priorities, to come to an agreement on a plan that could change the world?  In this episode, Alan Staple, former Vice President of Market Access at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, joins host Inder Singh to discuss the deals he’s done in reshaping markets . Staple takes listeners behind closed doors at major pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies and gives an up-close look at tactics that enabled massive price reductions that brought access to life-saving health products for millions of people. He shares lessons he learned along the way about how to do this kind of work.  The Market Shapers Podcast is a production of Inder Singh and is produced by University FM. [https://university.fm/] This interview was recorded in April 2025.   EPISODE QUOTES: When market shaping starts with an impossible assignment 02:09: So, a lot of these assignments, especially when I first started, kind of, had the Mission Impossible, sort of, sound about them. Somebody would call you up and say, "Look, we've got to get this done. Here's what has to happen. Get on with it," and, you know, call me. And sometimes our goals were extremely audacious and very, very challenging. And you would get about as much background information as they do on the Mission Impossible show. You get two sentences, and then the tape, kind of, evaporates, and you're going, ″Oh, really? Okay, how are we going to do it?" One of the largest market shaping deals ever attempted 19:17: This was probably one of the biggest deals that had ever been done in market-shaping at the time, where the Gates Foundation and others risked over $300 million on a six-year-long volume guarantee, where quarterly orders had to be met over that entire period. And we committed to 40 million units of the product at a time when the sales were around 2 million units a year. So, we were predicting a very large increase in usage. Why credibility is a foundation of market shaping 01:37:  If you are going to engage in bringing the supply side and the demand side together as a, kind of, trusted intermediary, the key to that is credibility. How are you going to have credibility with the sellers, the drug companies, and diagnostic companies? How are you going to have credibility with the buyers, who may represent national health services, in our case, or international agencies that are procuring products for these countries? How do you get that credibility, and then how do you utilize it to become a trusted intermediary? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.