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 . . .