Tag Archives: market research

Demand for mobile financial services in Nepal

Debbie Watkins, SBI’s Head, Implementation for Alternative Delivery Channels, was one of the key speakers at the Mobile Financial Services Summit hosted in Kathmandu, Nepal in June 2012.

The conference was organized by USAID Nepal through its Nepal Economic, Agriculture and Trade (NEAT) program in order to “set the stage for an interactive dialogue on how Nepal can successfully develop its mobile financial services sector and encourage further innovation in mobile money and branchless banking.”

Nepal, with a population of 27 million and a per capita income of less than US$650, is one of the least developed countries in the world. The country has seen modest development progress over the past 15 years: poverty rates have declined steadily; child mortality and tuberculosis infections have been reduced by half; and 90 percent of children are now initially enrolled in school. This development has also been reflected in the growth of the Nepalese financial sector – aided by recent developments in banking technology which have expanded banking from the traditional brick-and-mortar infrastructure of staffed branches to a system supplemented by channels such as automated teller machines (ATM), credit/debit cards, internet banking and online money transfers.

However, despite significant improvements, access to basic financial services is still restricted only to certain segments of the society. For the financially excluded, opening and maintaining bank accounts in Nepal can be complex and time-consuming due to lack of awareness, geographic inaccessibility, and low availability of targeted products. Continue reading →

Marketing – for whose benefit?

This post is written by Debbie Watkins, SBI’s Head, Implementation for the Alternative Delivery Channels practice.

Photo Credit: Marketing Sherpa

An unfortunate truth:  the vast majority of advertising agencies design beautiful campaigns that will get THEM new clients, when they should be designing relevant campaigns that will get YOU new clients. Mark Stevens, the author of “Your Marketing Sucks” and owner of MSCO.com (I’m a big fan), advises his readers to check whether the company they’re hiring has won any awards for creativity – and if so, not to hire them.

I like that approach. The aim of your marketing campaign is not to get people to say “ooooooh, that’s a nice ad” but instead “that product can really solve some problems for me.” As the old adage goes, when you want to sell a drill, don’t actually sell the drill – sell the hole…

Trying to convince low-income consumers currently operating in an almost exclusively cash-based society to change their financial services provider is not easy. And when their existing “financial services provider” could be a hole in their mattress, or the next-door neighbor, relevance and clearly understood value is essential . A large percentage of the informal services they’re using right now are “free” (although they undoubtedly have a cost associated with them).

So marketing messages shouldn’t focus on the phone and how cool it is. They also shouldn’t focus on the bank and how large it is – the consumer knows that anyway, and they haven’t been using it for a reason (and I hope you know what that reason is, and if it’s for any reason other than accessibility I hope you’ve done something to fix it).  Marketing should focus very clearly on how your solution addresses the problems faced by your target market that were identified in the market research you undertook. bKash, SBI’s mobile financial services client in Bangladesh, has some great examples.

The Goal: Answering the big questions

This post is written by Debbie Watkins, SBI Resident Adviser for the bKash project in Bangladesh. This is part of her ongoing series on “The Goal.”

Many organisations will use the services of an expert market research company when they need to find out “what people want” (and this is generally a better way than sending out in-house staff who think your proposed product is wonderful – refer to my previous article). The organisation tends to give a vague description of some questions they would like to be asked, then hands over a lot of money and waits for the results. The results, when they come back, will be represented in pie charts, bar charts and scatter diagrams in a range of colours. The organisation listens to the presentation and then goes ahead with what they were planning to do in the first place.

Photo credit: Audience Response Info

Sound familiar? And if so, how do you avoid it and get useful data that enables you to make informed decisions?

Rule number 1: Be totally, totally clear on what the big questions are you want answering. These could be something like: “what price should we charge our client?”; “where should we put our first 5/20/100 agents?”; “which products should we be offering and to whom?” Continue reading →

The Goal: Getting inside the customer’s head

This post is written by Debbie Watkins, SBI Resident Adviser for the bKash project in Bangladesh.

Humans have a propensity to label people, ideas or things based on our initial opinions of them. Ori and Ron Brafman, the authors of “Sway – the irresistible pull of irrational behaviour” term this the “diagnosis bias,” and it includes our inability to reconsider those initial value judgments once we’ve made them. Once a person is given a label (and even indirectly, a diagnosis), it’s hard for people to see other people in a way that isn’t biased by that label.

Here are some labels to think about: “Low income”. “Disadvantaged”. “Unbanked”. Typical biased diagnoses include “stupid” (a real conversation I have had with someone I worked with in the past was centred around their view that “if poor people were clever, they wouldn’t be poor, would they?”). The truth of course is generally entirely different – although often lacking in formal education, the “street savviness” of your typical ADC prospective client, and especially their ability to work out whether a new offering is a good deal for them, is pretty high…

Photo credit: Shadowbend Studios

The only way to be sure that your planned ADC offering will be embraced by the people you’re planning to offer it to is to get inside their heads. You need to understand their hopes (so you can help them be realised), their fears (in order to quell them) and their challenges (in order to overcome them). Once you have an offering that can meet these three basic needs (and you’re able to articulate it – but more of that another time), you know you have a value proposition.

The only way to get inside their heads is to get out there and talk to them. As we all know, you need to talk to a lot of people, and to ask them very neutral and non-leading questions, and then to see the patterns of what they’re saying. The big problem with this is – being neutral. You WANT this to succeed. You WANT people to want your great idea. (And you perhaps WANT them, just a little bit, to not be smart enough to decide that your offering has no distinct advantages over the informal/illegal channel they’re currently using).  And because you want this, you (often inadvertently) structure or phrase the questions you’re asking in a leading way, making it almost a selling exercise. It’s easy to make people give you almost any answer you want, if you ask it in a certain way. So the first part of “meeting the customer need” is to be true to yourself.

Next in this series:  Getting research data that speaks to you