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.
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.
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.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Inder Singh: Welcome to Market Shapers, a podcast about harnessing capitalism for good. I'm Inder Singh. Over the years, I've had the privilege of working with incredible people, building products, forging deals, and shaping markets that have impacted millions of lives.
On this show, I sit down with the leaders, innovators, and behind-the-scenes deal makers who've changed the way markets work, often in ways most people never see. We'll unpack how they did it, what they learned, and how those lessons can help tackle the big challenges ahead.
Hi, everyone. This is Inder. I'm excited to be back after a bit of a break whilst doing a ton of traveling. Now, before we go on to the second part of our season, I want to step away from the interviews with guests for just a moment and I want to talk about the first step in effective market-shaping — and that is building buying power.
Now, this is a fairly straightforward concept in market-shaping, but I think it’s worth pausing on because it sets the stage for the more complex work that we’ll talk about next.
If you don't represent real buyers, real volumes, a real commitment to spending money, you're never going to get suppliers to respond.
That's the “what.” But this podcast is about the “how.” So, let's talk about how these organizations built effective buying power.
As I listened back to all of our guests this season, they all used the first same move, and that’s building a buying club. Now, when you think about a buying club, I'm sure you think about getting discounted mayonnaise at Costco. But used here, it was a powerful tool.
So, let's recap. The people we spoke with worked in completely different sectors: global health, climate, and clean energy. They mostly have never met each other, and they certainly didn't learn from each other, but they arrived at the same place independently. They built, aggregated, and harmonized demand, and then they took that demand and represented it to the supply side.
And it all makes sense when you think about the underlying market dynamics.
And that is uncertainty, uncertainty around whether there's general interest in a product or whether there's a real customer with a real willingness to pay. And that's particularly true in the markets that we've been talking about all season, these markets that create a public good, something that society would ideally have.
So, let's make this concrete. Everybody probably wants a vaccine for a devastating disease. The question isn't whether it would benefit society or whether people generally want it. The question is whether someone has a willingness to pay for it, one that's high enough to justify the costs and risks of creating that product in the first place and producing it at scale
In these public good markets, it's hard to disaggregate the signal behind “we want it” and “we're willing to pay.” And these buying clubs used by our market shapers change that. They change it from a general desire into concrete demand. So, let's review how our guests have approached this, how they've used buying clubs as a first step in market shaping, and let's start with Rich Powell.
Rich runs the Clean Energy Buyers Association, or CEBA. And about a decade ago, something remarkable happened — three companies in the U.S. voluntarily committed to buying clean energy. These were Walmart, Google, and General Motors. And they were champions of the clean energy movement. They made commitments. These weren't press releases saying “clean energy matters.” These were binding long-term commitments.
As Rich put it, “It was like a very useful snowball. More and more companies went out and made these commitments.”
So, the signal got louder, more companies joined the mix, developers started building clean energy technology, and investors started funding it. Now, today, CEBA has contracted over 100 gigawatts of clean energy. That’s more than any U.S. state. That's a remarkable number. And it started with just these three companies deciding to go first. CEBA today represents the buying power of not only those three companies, but the hundreds of others that have joined the movement.
Now, think about what it actually took for that first Walmart or Google or GM executive to do that. They had to walk into a board meeting and say, "I want to sign a 15 or 20-year contract for something that's still more expensive than what we use today." That's a real career risk. That’s a champion paving the way. Those early movers, those champions, matter more than people realize. And what you're going to see is this pattern of finding a few champions, big buyers that you pull together and you represent real buying power to the supply side. The supply side then responds.
Now, let's go back another decade to someplace completely different. Let's go back to 2002 and what CHAI, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, was doing. CHAI was founded with one goal: to get life-saving HIV medicines to people in developing countries who really needed them but couldn't afford them.
So, what did CHAI do? They went country by country, sitting down with health ministers, understanding exactly what each country needed, what products, what quantities, when they'd buy them, and on what terms. And they were able to get four of them, just four of them at the beginning, to come together and agree to allow CHAI to represent them to the supply side. So, they built real buying power, real customers. And these countries were agreeing to certain terms that CHAI requested that would help with conversations with the suppliers, guaranteeing payment on time, things like that. When they took all of that, all these separate conversations, and built a single unified picture of demand from these four countries, here's who wants it, here's how much, here's when, and they brought that to the suppliers, that was something the suppliers, these manufacturers of medicines, could actually plan against. It wasn't a bunch of scattered countries, each asking for something slightly different. It was real. It was credible. It was aggregated and harmonized. And suppliers responded.
So, we're talking about a big volume of purchases. So, what does a supplier do? It offers a volume-based discount. Now, CHAI took that cost reduction work to a completely different level. They started using cost-plus negotiations, pooled procurement, building demand forecasts. They took that to a completely different level to get price reductions.
Now, we're going to talk about that separately. The second part of the season, we'll interview more people from CHAI, and we'll synthesize the CHAI playbook, what it was back then, what it evolved to. But let's start with this point of building real buying power. What did these two stories have in common?
So, what do these two stories have in common? Rich's companies put real money on paper. CHAI showed up with real commitments. Both had done zthe hard work of getting buyers to agree on what they actually wanted, and both had earned the right to walk into a room and say, "We speak for these purchasers, not as advocates. We speak for the actual buyers."
That's buying power. And building it is harder than it sounds because buying power isn't just about finding buyers, it's about getting three specific things right. 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. Global health has created a specific term for this — the target product profile — a written specification of exactly what a health product needs to do and approximately how much it needs to cost. If you can hand a supplier a document that says, "Here's precisely what we want. Here are buyers who are committed to purchasing it, and here's what they will pay," that's a fundamentally different signal and set of information than vague aspirations.
Second, you need real commitments. Manufacturers and investors are not naive. They know the difference between a buyer who says, "We'd love to see this exist," and a buyer who commits and says, "We will pay X for Y volume." One is a wish, the other is a market in the making.
And lastly, you need to earn the right to represent those buyers, to be believed when you speak for real demand — not as an advocate, as an actual voice of the purchasers. Alan Staple told us a story about this. CHAI was negotiating a lower price for a tuberculosis diagnostic. They flew out to meet the manufacturer in California, but they were nearly turned away at the door. What saved the meeting was a letter sent overnight from the South African Minister of Health on official government letterhead.
As Alan put it,
“You got to get your act together before you engage with the private sector. You can't just do it as an advocacy thing. You've got to be representing the buy side.”
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. 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. And remember, CHAI developed their approach in global health in 2002, a decade later, people working in climate independently arrived at the same place. It's not a coincidence. It's what works.
But here's where I want to leave you today: 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. There are almost always other things in the way, things that stop buyers and sellers from actually doing deals, even when they both want to. Figuring out what those things are and getting rid of them, that's where it gets really interesting and really hard. That's what we're going to talk about next time.
Outro: Thanks for listening to the Market Shapers podcast. I'm Inder Singh. If you enjoyed the show, please like it or leave us a review and subscribe in your favorite app so you don't miss the next episode. Market Shapers is produced by me with help from University FM.
Special thanks to Renaissance Philanthropy, Griffin Catalyst, and the Digital Harbor Foundation for their support.