Orissa Market Trials Pt II

Recap: This is the second of two parts on market trialing of a hand dynamo phone charger called the K-Turn Monster. I'm conducting the trials in a rural part of India's Orissa state near a small town called Parlekhemundi.



Orissa is a beautiful state with serene landscapes - the Eastern Ghat mountains are spaced with rice paddies in between them. Take a look:



The previous post finished with the initiation of a one-week user test, including a town and a village. Electrician vocational students (pictured) from a school I'm staying at introduced us to their home villages. These photos should indicate what some of these villages look like:




During the week while users were trying the product, I completed a tie up with an organization I’m close with here called AID-ITC for them to stock the units and fulfill basic servicing as necessary. So in the box of K-Turn Monsters, users are now getting warranty cards in addition to a promo handout for showing their friends. Here is some background on AID-ITC:



Closely associating itself with Gandhian values, Aid Industrial Training Center (ITC) is part school for 5-8 year old children coming from surrounding villages. It is also in skills building, maintaining significant capacity for training in sewing and pottery. New school rooms are completing construction designed by US-trained civil engineer Dr. Dhanada Mishra. There’s a co-op quality to it as there are irrigated rice paddies on the premises.


It’s here I absolutely must give a special shout-out to Dr. Nrusingha Panda who coordinates AID-ITC – Dr. Panda has been instrumental to coordinating my getting set up here especially with staying at the business school CSRM.

With his guidance and Dr. Dhanada Mishra’s help, I benefited from accessing the campuses’ excellent facilities such as its well-stocked technical and business libraries as well as reaching out to both MBA and vocational students, plus the vocational lab.
Big shout-outs also to Deepak Kumar and Manas Samal. These MBA students of CSRM made for excellent assistants and translators and I was very pleased to have them join up for these efforts. They’re also rockin’ volleyball players to boot, an activity that made staying here especially fun!

Now on to the user tests. With the communities we visited, our goal was to treat each community as a social network within which we would seed opinion leaders and high status individuals. That being the ideal, we of course compromised when encountered by reality on the ground. We did the user tests to gain 1) comprehension of how users would use the product 2) Feedback on price points. Knowing that word of mouth would get around, I designed the study so that we would test high price points first, then steadily graduate to lower price points as circumstances warranted. The communities are a small, 30,000 person town called Kasinagar, and a small village, perhaps 200 persons in the immediate area called Anu Konda.

Kasinagar (above) and Anu Konda (below) communities

In the town it was difficult to seed people who could reference each other (see Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Everett Roger's Diffusion of Innovation), we just stuck with individuals that we somehow managed to connect ourselves to. These were a mobile accessory shopkeeper, a factory worker, the son of the town chairman, and the electrical vocational student who led us there. The village was small enough for this kind of social navigation, but I think we got so caught up with the crowd that presented itself that we neglected to assert seeking out the opinion leaders like the village sarpanch or the highly influential school-teachers. Selected testers including students and paddy farmers.


Town and village dwellers learning about dynamo phone charging

During the testing week we called each of our test users. We reached the Kasinagar town users easily and they reported no problems and simply inquired about the price. Unfortunately we couldn't connect to the Anu Konda village users by phone! Their phones always read as off or out of antenna range, perplexing us. Naturally, we were eager to find out what was going on as the inability to reach them might speak to inferior capability of the K-Turn. At the end of the test week, we visited Kasinagar. We provided our post-survey and offered a higher pricepoint. Per the survey the residents appreciated the phone charging and torch functionality. Everyone found our high pricepoint to expensive, so zero sales unfortunately.

The next day we visited Anu Konda village. Despite our expressed wish to survey people alone to avoid influenced responses, the same crowd as before who had become our testers, quickly gathered. Now, what ensued perplexed me greatly - what I could make out to start with was a lot of elevated chatter in Telugu (secondary local language) which unfortunately none of my team could speak. What I could make out was their continuously repeating the English word "Rate!" "Rate!" which is their word for price. We had translated for us then that everyone thought that we would somehow force them to pay for the price of the unit. We learned that was informed by a difficult experience they had in the past where an outsider came to the town to sell medicines on a weekly installment basis. However the mechanics of that transaction worked out, after some weeks outsider ended up walking off with their money without providing enough product.
So, picturing a torch-and-pitchfork situation for getting the evil beast (me!) out of their village, I refunded their 20 rupee deposit on the spot to help reinforce that there was no way we could force them to pay anything for the products, following which they also returned the units. I went a bit further and stated that we would not sell to them at all at this time, a change from plan. Still came the entreaties "Rate, rate!" Informed by the Kasinagar price feedback, elucidated distribution costing, and discussions with my team, we had come to a moderate end user price point - but this was to be disclosed at the end of the survey only when it came time to offer a sale. So instead I had them disclose this moderate price point right away. Now *as soon* as they heard it, they immediately lost interest in any further discussion or interaction, and simply walked away. Ouch!
I'm not gonna lie - that encounter bummed me out. I think I'll never quite understand, after all the good will we built when we first visited their village, why the villager testers up and walked away, denying the benefit of their valuable feedback. For sure they seemed very skeptical that we wouldn't disclose the price ; No matter how irrational it sounds, in my gut I felt that all they wanted was to spoil what must be our 'nefarious' user test plans. We managed to give that village's vocational student a survey, and learned second-hand from his father that the testers, his neighbors, were trying the product over the next day, and after some ad-hoc phone testing, quickly lost interest. I'm told we also suffered some simple bad luck, an influential non-tester with an axe to grind spread around a lot of negativity over it. Ah well, feedback's feedback, even if it doesn't come in the form we intended - 'price is too expensive, and the product requires to much effort to provide value'.
Back at the school the next day, I informed the Kasinagar vocational student of the lowered price, feeling bad about having had to offer him a higher price earlier for test purposes, and knowing he'd find out about it anyways. Instead of being unhappy or angry, he decided to purchase a unit! So I walked him through the warranty card filling and it was done.

(. . . )

With many pieces in place, I still had to finish setting up the channel before leaving. With product stocked at AID-ITC, numbers hashed out, and servicing in place, I still needed to identify a means of driving sales. AID-ITC was too remote from the main road to be an obvious place to draw people. Time was getting on and I wasn't sure what to do. I went to go think about it over some micro-coffees made outside the school gate where there are some shops for food and daily essentials. I'd become friendly with the instant coffee vendor and he knew what business I was doing. We'll call him Coffee-Wallah.
Well some days earlier I had made an random visit to a nearby village named Upalada close to the CSRM / Centurion Institute of Technology. I was told I'd be reaching them during their Haat, or village market session, and I thought I would try to build some demand demo'ing the K-Turn there. I wandered around making my way to the dais where the Haat should be taking place while carrying a box of K-Turns. I was getting a lot of looks and hearing a lot of abruptly ended conversations as I passed. Picture that you’re in your own town when a spaceships lands and a sandal-clad alien gets out to wander up and down your neighborhood streets and you get the idea.
It turned out the Haat had long since finished that day. Sighing I returned to the main road, for hailing passing buses returning to the school. Unfortunately, the streets were empty of any passing traffic. Meanwhile some locals gathered, asking me, "What's in the box?" I ignored, certainly it was too dark to do a demo, and anyways strange aliens initiating impromptu nighttime street introductions are no way to introduce a brand. But they were insistent, thinking to myself 'alright well they asked for it' and I began my demo. A crowd gathered, and I started showing them their phones getting charged with the K-Turn. Got some low-ball purchase offers and a request for shop-stocking. I passed around flyers containing contact infos in case any of them really wanted to try engaging. A truck finally came, and they arrange with the drivers to take me the 10 kilometers back to the school.
Ordinarily I would have filed the Upalada visit under 'random company ego stroking' and continued with channel-bringup activities, which brings us back to the Coffee Wallah. So once again I was pensively kicking back a few with Coffee-Wallah right outside the school's main gate. As I wallowed in caffeine-infusion, someone else kept trying to get my attention making turning motions with his hands. Finally gaining the presence of mind to realize he was mimicking the K-Turn motion, I asked him where he came from. He replied, 'Upalada', 10 kms away! He was part of the crowd I demo'd to! He trades in gas canisters up and down the road. It dawned on me that Coffee-Wallah's stand is a roadside hub stop for trade traffic up and down the road! So that same day I formulated a proposal for C-W - demo the K-Turn to appropriate passers by, especially traders, and explain to them how they can get their hands on it at nearby-yet-remote AID-ITC. He readily agreed to the terms I described - Now he earns 15 rupees commission for every unit traceable to his recommendation via a 'Coffee-Wallah sent me' declaration from the customer.

Coffee Wallah's demo'ing the K-Turn Monster

So now I have stock placed and a means to drive sales which is precisely what I need to have a complete channel with demand I can monitor over time – Excellent!
Summary: So as pleased as I was with the execution and progress, I would call the user feedback overall as negative, which is to say not justifying moving more volumes of the current product in this particular market unless the channel starts showing demand. Learnings are
1) improved market /targeting based on statistical information of cell antenna placement, call volume at a particular antennae, antenna ontime, and electricity ontime. In practice it would be very difficult to get all of these information even for a single mobile operator, but government-owned BSNL offers some promise as they are required to disclose.
2) product repositioning / refocus brand message.
Its clear that villagers will not suffer manual effort any more than the rest of us would to keep their phones charged when they have intermittent electricity available. That leaves commuters and emergency preparers as the remaining market segment. The branding statement then becomes “The K-Turns provide peace of mind - no matter what calamity has befallen you, you always have the power to keep connected on your cell phone”.
And I'm en route to the US. As I write I’m at rest on a meadow in Delhi’s central Connaught Place. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the remaining market segments include many devel*oped* world consumers, so while I'm monitoring demand from this micro-business I've set up and determining next steps, I’m finding that some related projects are germinating in mind . . .

Fasting in the face of corruption

This is an interim post as I'm completing the (large) post for the recent India work.
Indians recently have been supercharged by the protest, arrest, and fasting of a famous activist named Anna Hazare. (Anna's a man's name here). He's an older fellow associating himself with Gandhian tradition. He advocates the passage of a far-reaching anti-corruption bill in Parliament. The photo above shows the gateway of the remote rural school I was staying at in Orissa state's far-afield Parlekhemundi. When Anna was arrested, the students at the school spelled out 'No More Corruption' in candles, pictured above. Later they marched en masse around the town.
I first heard of this man in business school during a class in social entrepreneurship describing how back in the 1980's he got a village in Maharashtra state to close its abused alcohol shops, ultimately leading to much greater prosperity in the village. (I found it interesting, I am still as big a fan as the next guy of spirits ;) ) He's since set his sites on eradicating Indian corruption now, which is sort of like living in California and trying to eradicate the sunshine. So his influence and capturing of the Indian spirit is really impressive. Also, the body he demands to pass his bill is the same containing the members he accuses of corruption - people who would risk being detained and punished for corrupt practices after the bill's passage. Talk about an uphill battle. And so the progress of his movement's success is all the more impressive - Parliament agreed in principle to his demands, and after twelve days his fast was to close just this morning. Can you imagine, in the US, someone fasting to protest campaign finance? Then can you imagine that within two weeks, both houses of Congress debating the issue ad nauseam due to his fast? I think our system would let the man starve without so much as paying lip service to his cause inside the Capitol.

Well as I write I'm in Delhi during a two day layover. I overcame a bout of Delhi-belly (don't eat from the roadside nut vendors!) that unfortunately emptied itself all over the center of Connaught Place, and promptly headed to the city's Ramlila Maidan grounds to see Hazare's protest.

I tried on a hat of the same style that Mr. Hazare wears - see the photo below of an example of one - these hats were very popular at his rally, and a local handed me one :) .  Yet I debated how much direct support I wanted to show - I generally try to steer clear of showing my opinions in the middle of another country's political rally especially when I have limited visibility into the issues. Academics can rightly critique that his rally is motivating the passage of a bill forming a top-level organization above parliament and answerable to no one. I decided that anti-corruption in general was a worthwhile theme to get around, and moreover that marshaling the public energy towards achieving a shared public good is much more needed in the short term than early intellectual dithering resulting in inaction. I see and experience the far reaching effects of corruption every day while in India, including my day's Delhi-belly (think public works, sanitation, promoting food-prep practices). See my later posts from 2008 showing some effects of corruption.


How often does your grandfather (e.g. above) care enough about an issue that he'll *sit* and perhaps even *sleep* in the middle of the protest grounds?

I came across just one other foreigner on the grounds; I guess I was a little disappointed in the backpacker set. A note for travelers staying in Delhi: If you're going to stay in a moderately priced guesthouse, I highly recommend staying in Delhi's suburb called Gurgaon. The chaos level is *much* less than the Delhi itself, tends to be much cleaner, and often still with good access to the metro subway. I'll recommend where I stayed with excellent ambience and super friendly staff, the Royal Park Plaza in DLF Phase-1. You can search it on Google.

User Tests in India

Although this is a personal blog, so much of my time is spent on efforts developing my company that I thought I would post some company updates here. To remind: I push forward my startup in marketing off-grid mobile phone chargers to markets in the developing world. The chargers run on mobile, hand-operated dynamos.

I spent July in Shenzhen, securing exclusivity from my supplier of unique product who I have an excellent relationship with, agreeing on a turnkey model for their order fulfillment to my customers, identifying 2nd and 3rd product offerings, getting the first barebones website up and running at www.rstoem.com (check it out!), and took 30 units of the largest, most heavy-duty product with me to India for trialing with end users and sales. On to India efforts:

I've benefited a lot from introductions to people and organizations in the rural area of Orissa I'm based in, near the small town called Parlakhemundi. I'm happy to be based out of a well equipped, rural school called Jagganath Institute for Technology and Management.

View of campus from the library of JITM.

Importantly, they consist of a business school, technology school, and a vocational school. Two of the MBA students volunteered to help me plan and execute the marketings surveys and user testing. I decided we would present our plan to the vocational students since they come just from the surrounding villages, giving us the introductions we needed into their communities. (Students from the other schools, by contrast, come from all over the entire state of Orissa and then some, making them inappropriate for introductions). That presentation succeeded nicely, and we got four villages meeting the criteria we stated.
Following this, so far individuals from one local village and one small town have been carefully seeded with K-Turn Monsters for 1 week of user testing. Each person gets surveyed about their lifestyle and income, and puts down a twenty Rupee deposit (about 50 cents US) to ensure they ascribe some value to the product during the week of testing. After the week is up they will be surveyed again on if and how they used the product, and finally be given the opportunity to buy it. Excitement during our visits from people who listen to us introduce the product is always high, but I know that this is transient and must be backed up by their experience during the testing period. Right now am deciding which if any other villages will be visited.
Major learnings from this so far are centered around village segmentation. One
village will have lots of electricity on-time while another will not. One village will have high correlation of cell phone signal on-time to electricity on-time while another will not. (That correlation is important, villages with accessible cell phone signal even when there is no electricity, surprisingly common, are more compelling customers) Finally I'm more and more aware of an important BOP-marketing challenge - the greater the need of a village for a given good or service, the less accessible they are likely to be, and the less their ability to pay for products. So efficient targeting is paramount, so villages can be selected efficiently. Also efficient word of mouth building is critical, so that needful villagers can select themselves to seek out the product wherever it is stocked.
On the technical side of things, only last week noted that the units I'm carrying
differ from my sample in important ways. The dynamo diameter was subtly but importantly smaller which reduces its effectiveness on phones. Also, all of the units, including the approved sample, lacked lubrication and had a handle joint that was prone to slipping out. Luckily this school I'm based out of has a vocational branch where I was able to procure grease and adhesive to solve these problems. It just takes some time to make these fixes, about 10 mins per unit, so my little dorm room here looks like a workshop.
As I've been writing this post, have gotten feedback from one of the vocational students that his unit isn't continuously charging the phones he has tried on. If that's correct, it is unfortunate as the units I've provided for user testing that have performed well on my test phones. Phones he has tried on, Nokias, Micromaxes, and China's G5, are particularly prevalent in this environment so his feedback is important. Also as an electrician vocational student his opinion will be particularly referred to in his community. I'm having the student bring his K-Turn tomorrow so I can test it and with any luck, fix it so it works on his phone.
Finally, got feedback from the Jamaica/Haiti mobile operator, unfortunately negative. They
reported that the samples work as advertised, but, quoting: "
- The manual factor was not very appealing
- The life of the charge for the effort was not great
- The price point of the device was high "

So summarizing, progress is strong, but encountering negative market feedback... Anyways I'm particularly enjoying the successful relationship navigating, something this engineer has been historically very bad at . . . this is one point where some INSEAD org-behavior simulations are turning out very helpful. And I'm deeply indebted to Dhanada Mishra, Prof. Haribandhu Panda, Aid India / Aid-ITC organizations, and Orissa's JITM / Centurion Institute of Technology, and of course Patrick Walsh for all of their support through these efforts.