Archive for the ‘Perspective’ Category

The Mobile as a Post Industrial Platform for Social and Economic Development: Top 3 Trends in Africa

Source: CHI2007 “Reach Beyond” http://www.chi2007.org/attend/plenaries.php

Just over a decade ago, in San Jose, California, I was invited to speak as the Closing Plenary for the CHI 2007 25th Anniversary Conference. The theme was “Reach Beyond”, as this was the 25th Anniversary conference of the Computer Human Interaction society, and as the closing plenary, I was tasked with articulating the vision for the next 25 years of man machine interfaces. This was in May 2007, mere weeks before the launch of the iPhone. That’s important to note, because Apple’s little phone transformed the world of humans interfacing with computers in its own way. You must remember that back then we didn’t really send texts in the United States, and the mobile and it’s role in society had nowhere near the transformational impact it was having in the developing world. mPesa had just begun to catch attention in Kenya – particularly the Central Bank’s – and there were no such thing as apps or smartphones. This is the background and context in which I gave my talk, which sank without a trace in the history of impactful communication ;p

It was in April 2006, that I first wrote about the mobile phone as a post industrial platform, and as a driver for innovation, in its own right. Two snippets:

One of the recurring patterns I’ve been seeing of late is how mobile phones – not just the handset, but the system as a whole, have become drivers of innovation in emerging economies.
[…]
Not just in India or China; this phenomena of the handphone – freed from the shackles of state sponsored infrastructure required for landlines in the majority of these developing nations – has demonstrated its effect in improving the micro economy and providing opportunities for the entrepreneurially minded in hitherto backward regions around the world.

Today, 11 years and 4 months later, I would like to highlight the undeniable impact of the mobile platform in Africa’s development story by introducing the top 3 trends that are sweeping across the continent (and capturing global imagination) very briefly in 3 paragraphs below:

  1. Fintech solutions – Whether its mobile money transfers, instant mobile loans, or cross border payments and more complex back-end solutions; the financial services industry is being disrupted by the mobile platform, on smartphones and on feature phones. Mobile technology is rapidly becoming the default solution delivery system for the last mile of money in sub Saharan Africa.
  2. Solar power – This in turn is accelerating the rapid adoption of small solar systems for domestic energy needs in offgrid locations; a new pay as you use or “prepaid” solution for acquiring solar powered products and for charging can be seen to be launched in a yet another African country every month it seems. My favourite example is the solar powered cold room lockers that one can rent via micro mobile payments. In another year, I expect that one could replace the word “solar” with utilities, with the visible increase in solutions for potable water, and a plethora of government services shift online to the platform.
  3. Agritech – From the very basic “farmer information systems”, agritech is rapidly evolving to more nuanced and complex solution delivery via the ubiquitous phone. Whether its using the smartphone capabilities to identify the army worm pest infesting the fields, or decision support systems that let you choose the ideal species of tree to plant, given soil and drought conditions, agritech is a newly emergent megatrend on the mobile for African agriculture.

And the future, the next ten years? What will 2027 or 28 bring about? And, will we still be using the handheld device we have in our pockets right now? I can’t see it yet, but my gut tells me that easy access to powerful computing within reach of each and every one of us is something that will only be transformed but not replaced.

The Informal Industrial Ecosystem: An Introduction to REculture

The Art of Seeing Beauty in Garbage, Kenya, September 2010

This article introduces and explains some things I’ve been seeing in the informal industrial ecosystem in the developing world context for almost a decade now. First noticed in 2009, I then named it REculture, a neologism to capture the vast and complex ecosystem I saw in the revenue generating facility of recycle, replace, repurpose, reuse and resale. Given contemporary interest in developed country concepts such as the circular economy, and other sustainable and ecological initiatives, I thought it timely to sit down and attempt to synthesize the past work before proceeding to write more on current events.

What is REculture?

I thought I’d start from the beginning – is there, for example, a difference between “the entrepreneur” and “the producer”, “the creator” and “the innovator”, if at all? And if none, then perhaps start to fill in some few blanks based on our earlier thinking on the BoP “consumer” and their mindset, worldview or value system.~ June 2009

In July 2009, I was inspired by my observation of a man sitting under a tree in the administrative district of New Delhi with a visibly large bag of buttons by his side. His service, to the civil servants rushing to and fro from important governmental meetings, was to quickly repair a missing button from their suit jacket or shirt. Not unlike a shoeshine boy, this gentleman’s service was on demand, while you waited, his fingers flying rapidly with the needle as he sewed a reasonable facsimile of your missing button back on for you.

Look at the unusual yet welcome niche he had found for himself! A repair service that could only work in this part of the city where the common uniform was a suit and tie and important visitors the norm.

Once he opened my eyes to what it was I was seeing on the streets – the entrepreneurial opportunities squeezed out of the margins of daily life – I began noticing such services more and more. Repair, re-use, re-purposing, resale, and, in their own inimitable way, recycling of used up or abandoned products of industrialization were turning out to provide a significant chunk of the revenue streams of many of the informal sector’s service providers who now became visible to me.

In June 2009, I wrote:

…many other such observations got me thinking about the whole RE culture among the BoP. Stepping back, if you take the broad space of REuse, REpurpose, REpair and REcycle – its the low hanging fruit for the BoP entrepreneur’s opportunities for income generation. In fact, REpair is an entire professional service area in its own right, perhaps a subset of the opportunity space in the informal economy with varying degrees of skill and ability required.

But coming back to the other three, it seems at first glance that they look to be more or less the same thing i.e. how different is it to reuse a plastic bottle to contain some liquid from recyling it? particularly if the manufacturer had intended for it to be a disposable container? Yet, from the big picture perspective, one can say (and it has been said before) the whole concept of recycling is a cost in the OECD world whereas its actually a source of income, in a myriad ways, among the BoP.

The second thing that struck me, when I pondered these signs of a post-consumption economic ecosystem, was that the actors in the informal sector – whom we now discuss as traders, fabricators, service providers – were still then thought of as the “Bottom of the Pyramid” or the BoP – the economically vulnerable, the marginalized, the low income barely making ends meet on a dollar or two a day. There was no attempt at segmentation, this was the lumpen mass of the next 4 billion. Even though the late CK Prahalad had called them out as micro-producers, creators, and innovators, in his seminal book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, those who had grabbed the label with both hands and run with it were still thinking in terms of consumption. “How do we make products profitably for the poor?”

What about the creators, the makers, the innovators, and the producers in the informal economic ecosystem?

Again, back in June 2009, I wrote:

I am attempting to evaluate whether all our previous observations and learnings viz., “Life is hard” (the mindset and values of a customer at the BoP particularly one living on an irregular income) can help us begin to understand the other side of the coin, that is, the “innovator” or “creator/maker” or simply, the “informal business owner or service provider” at the BoP.

At this point at least, it seems to me, that rather than quibble about each individual word choice to describe “who” or “what” they are, perhaps we’re better off looking at the “why” and “how” – by this I mean, that the driver of motivation is to generate an income stream (the why) and the gaps observed, as mentioned above, are the opportunity spaces (the how). That is, the BoP seem to display more of a tendency towards ‘opportunity spotting’ (not quite the same as the word opportunists, though that may also apply in many cases or situations), filling the niche quickly with a service or product. Some of these services have arisen spontaneously around the developing world, mobile phone repair comes to top of mind.

It feels as though its a far more active than passive quality – poverty and hardship can be a powerful motivational driver in itself, though we tend to overlook the ingenuity and creativity involved.

That is, back then, just over 9 years ago, I connected the dots I was seeing in this space – the mindset and values of the low income customers and their post consumption behaviours, taken together with the “RE” space where visibly they were earning income – and framed it so:

That is, the lower income market tends towards maintenance and extending the lifespan of the products (through repair or repurposing it) they purchase rather than disposing it for convenience or replacing it for a trendier style. All very obvious, you say, but its this very same quality that leads to the wide variety of opportunities for the entreprenuerial or the innovative to make some money (or even a living). From the very basic, in terms of skills and ability such as the button repair guy to the complex, such as the mobile phone hacker, all of these services meet an ‘unmet need’ in the market, an opportunity gap which they can fill.

However, what’s interesting about this is the fact that these opportunities would very rarely be either a) spotted as one in mainstream consumer culture; b) not be a gap per se due to a difference in mindset/worldview OR even c) not be profitable enough, given the comparative cost of labour vs the price of the product involved. These conditions for making money, and more so, making money that is deemed a valid ROI seem only to be available among the lower income demographic and in the developing world.

For the precondition to their success is also a sufficient customer base seeking such a service and their willingness to pay for it,  and that, imho, emerges from their mindset as BoP consumers, one quality of which is their need to Maximise the return on their investment (purchase). This shows up in this context as a wish to REpair, REuse, REsell (for REpurpose or REcycling or whatever along those lines) – I doubt if they’ve stopped coming by from door to door among the ‘consuming classes’ in India to buy old bottles, newspapers and other sundry junk. (A sign of development if it stops?)

Once I could “see” the entire post consumption entrepreneurial activity in the informal sector, I went back to my research documentation conducted in rural Philippines and India for the original ‘prepaid’ economy work, and pulled out the patterns seen in the photographs that, when fitted together, showed all the evidence of an entire industrial ecosystem. As a working title for this seemingly vast economic space within the informal economy across Asia and Africa, I had called it REculture – the group blog went on spawn a magazine.

An entire industrial ecosystem within the informal economy based on the discards of the consumer lifestyle

A discarded Kraft cream cheese bottle would be picked out of the garbage by a waste picker and sold to an intermediary who would clean and sort these by colour and size and sell them on to a fabricator, who in turn, would convert these into affordable – and handmade mass produced – kerosene lamps, completed with spot welded wick tube.

An entire industrial life cycle from “raw material” through to “mass production” supported by distribution and retail. The only difference? The informal nature of the entire value chain and the post consumption adaptation of the materials and discards.

My concluding thoughts at the stage in which I’d left my explorations almost a decade ago can be summed up thus:

So, at this point, early stages of exploration though it is, one could say that the whole area of “post consumption” consumer practices – most of which have withered away like the appendix in the ‘rich’ world – forms one major  basis for both products and services, with value addition to varying degrees, in the ‘informal economies’ of the developing world.

There are insights to be teased out here on flexible, adaptable, ‘on demand’ business models ~ but applied outside the virtual world. Scarcity of resources and circumstance force lean overheads and inventory. Constraints of demand and customer purchasing power create their own flows in the chaos. Is there a pattern to the flow of the informal after all?

What next?

I summed up this history so as to provide me with the foundation and backdrop to pick up the threads of this conversation, now with the added insights of the past decade, and the increasingly sophisticated frameworks of framing the informal economy as a commercial environment in its own right, populated with entrepreneurs and niches that the mainstream overlooks.

As the topics of sustainability, resource conservation, and the circular economy become top of mind and critical, the early lessons from the developing world will only become more important going forward. I’ll be writing more under the category and tag “REculture” for old times’ sake.

Competitive Advantage & Customer Relationships: Lessons from Market Mummies of Ghana

Source: Gerry van Dyke presentation

Source: Gerry van Dyke presentation

How would you differentiate yourself in this informal retail market? Ghanaian market research guru Gerry van Dyke took a closer look at the market ‘mummies’ – Mama Biashara, as we call her – and their consumer marketing techniques in the “non-label environment”. His findings form an excellent foundation for understanding marketing and customer relationships in the informal sector. You can explore insights from his presentation here (PDF).

The story that follows tells the interesting marketing skills that reside in the traditional African market and the similarities in the tools employed by modern marketing.

Designed in China, Made in Africa.

In Ethiopia, Transsion Holdings, a Chinese company, is manufacturing handsets costing as little as $10 in an industrial park outside Addis Ababa. Mobile phone models from Tecno, Infinix, and Itel brands, which all belong to Transsion, to be Made in Africa.

Almost 13 years ago, in December of 2005, I wrote my first column for BusinessWeek which began with the sentence “Designed in California, Built in China.” That referred to Apple’s iconic iPod, the MP3 player that industrial design made into a household name, one that led to a whole new medium: podcasting.

Imagine the scale, depth, and level of change that must take place in production planning and control, not to mention supply chains and global value chains, for this continental shift in design and manufacturing to have taken place in less than half a generation.

Berlin’s sustainable lifestyle is our emerging future

Workshop on making your kitchen sustainable, Berlin, 4th August 2018

Berlin is to an environmentally conscious, renewable energy, sustainable ecologically friendly lifestyle what Tokyo’s Harajuku Girls used to be to fast fashion. The pioneer, the path breaker, the evidence of quality of life balanced with conservation. I envy Berliners their city. It is a world city and its still affordable.

Bio is mainstream, not an organic premium, and at the airport the plastic bottle of water was priced 4 times as much as water in a recyclable cardboard container.

There’s no mountains to climb in order to live with a smaller footprint, more leisure time, the calm re-ordering of priorities, the half day off in the sun taking the toddlers to the public fountain to splash and play. This was my introduction to Berlin.

City dwellers would recognize the simplified hyperbole of a short term visitor attempting to grasp the entire sense of the city in a few short days, but forward looking companies, startups, spaces, and people abound. If a “Silicon Valley” of Germany emerges, it will be Berlin.

Rocket Internet is already headquartered there as are any number of startups. The ecosystem is so mature that its hiving off into narrower and narrower specialities. All of which is a good thing to happen as the range and diversity of sustainable solutions that meet the bar of a bunch of EU certifications and regulations is now wide enough and broad enough to show clear patterns of consumer behaviour transformation.

Its almost like Berlin is the living example of the Post Climate Hoax Adapt Immediately era, and its clearly an economically viable and feasible one. And nobody’s apologizing for eating less meat and more vegetables.

Can the structure for innovation planning be used to disrupt itself?

This diagram is from Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Methods. It is the basis for his structured approach for innovation planning, and the essence of what is taught at the methods driven human centered design program at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago. Today I want to question some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie it – and from the very beginning of the process, not simply at Phase 5 (Explore Concepts) as given in the book. Some notes on this phase are shared below:

Explore Concepts: In this mode, we do structured brainstorming to explore new concepts. The insights and principles framed earlier provide the starting points for ideation, as well as guides to ensure we’re on track with matching concepts to needs. This helps make our concepts defensible and grounded in reality. In addition to the product and service, ideas for branding, communication, and even business models, are explored. This is the first stage we begin to construct rough (low-fidelity) prototypes – they help focus the team discussions, and provide probes for early user feedback or help the client clarify and refine their product development strategy whilst giving us feedback on the technical aspects.

And the mindsets recommended for this mode include:

  1. Challenging assumptions
  2. Standing in the future
  3. Exploring concepts at the fringes
  4. Seeking clearly added value
  5. Narrating stories about the future

Yet, what I question today is whether these mindsets that encourage experimentation and exploration should come up so late in the process, at the concept development stage, long after research and analysis have been completed? It is true that Vijay says the process is non linear and that a conceptual brainstorm (mode 5) may lead the way into research designed to validate its viability, feasibility and desirability, but this is at the tactical level of business innovation rather than at the strategic level. I question whether its possible to use this powerful and methodical approach to begin with a structured and rigorous questioning of our initial assumptions at the very inception itself in order to over turn the often implicit and tacit drivers of consumption driven growth seeking only to maximize profitability.

Let me share an earlier variation of this diagram first, where the real and the abstract are also mapped on to the process.

It is here, at the real stage, where we seek to understand what is what – through research, before we can analyse it and synthesize our narratives and concepts, where we have the opportunity to question our assumptions regarding the ‘system’. The lower left quadrant where we seek to “understand the real” is where we have the power to make the change that can genuinely disrupt business as usual. Not in the sense of a business model that disrupts but still holds the premise that all profits should flow to the shareholders, or a shift in the corporate’s focus to services from manufacturing but without the explicit articulation of environmental impact or resource conservation. To disrupt business as usual in today’s world would mean starting to question Whom are we serving? Why? For whose benefit? from scratch rather than leaving them unasked, resulting in default assumptions that a business only seeks to innovate to increase its own profits rather than seeking to serve a greater good such as the planet and the wildlife.

The triple bottomline approach captures the end results for those corporations who are already oriented in this way but is there a structured and rigorous planning approach to ensure their near future innovation and strategies align with these corporate goals and visions? And, is there such a flexible tool that the smallest startup can use it to think of how they will choose to do business – after all, it is a choice, and framing it up front in the product and service development process means that it now becomes an explicit choice, a considered decision to be taken, rather than one after the fact or halfway down the process when some inadvertent outcome leads to challenges that were not foreseen.

Sustainable product development already has numerous robust and validated systems and processes, from green buildings to recyclable packaging, what is missing however is the holistic integration of design and manufacturing (which hold the maximum power for good for the planet and the people) with the business thinking and the sustainable revenue generation strategies that can ensure that probability of the innovation’s success is maximized.

And, if we can design the fuzzy front end to be customized to the priority needs of any particular operating environment then following through with this adapted approach to innovation planning for the informal economy or for sub Saharan Africa’s consumer markets will be a cakewalk. Half the current challenge of business planning and corporate strategy in disparate operating environments with very distinctly different conditions is that the methods, tools, and frameworks available to us are all the same, and primarily developed in the context of highly industrialized and information rich consumer markets. They leave assumptions on the conditions and constraints of the operating environment untouched and implicit*.

Thus, going back to the first diagram, where the first mode is Sense Intent:

Sense Intent: Before jumping straight into a project, we pause to consider the world in which our intended users reside. We scan the horizon, looking at technological & socio-economic trends, precursors, competing products, and a variety of other factors that can affect our topic area. All of these offer us a way to reframe our initial problem and help us think of our initial intent and the direction in which we should be moving. This is where our research questions are mapped out, and the problem space described.

This is where the power resides to remake our world. What if we began with the mindset that:

  1. Challenged assumptions
  2. Stood in the future
  3. Explored the fringes
  4. Sought added value and began with articulating for whom (all stakeholders)

And began with the story (5. Narrating stories about the future) about the changes we wished to see, and the impact we wished to have, on our own future, thus inspiring and informing the scope and shape of the research we conducted in order to know people (mode 2) and know context (mode 3) so as to gather the type of forward looking insights we would need in order shape and craft something wholly different from the ground up.

What if we thought about innovation very differently from the current context of a new product or a new service, of looking to disrupt the existing even while seeking to exist within the conventional frameworks of success – profits, scale, reach, impact, fundraising et al

We need new narratives and new goals but ad hoc design fictions and scenarios aren’t going achieve the kind of new we need for the way our planet has changed. Along with the limits of what can be, we have also reached the limits of where our existing methods and tools can take us. And without changing those, at the systemic level, we’ll still be trying to come up with changes within the constraints of what has already been established. We don’t need the existing tools that help us to think outside the box, what we now need are the tools to build new boxes.

 

*This is the tyranny of dominant logic CK Prahalad spoke about.

Open-Source on Hyperspeed: Next generation innovation lessons from Shenzhen

In Shenzhen, 山寨 (shanzhai) has a different meaning than mountain stronghold—yet the term so eloquently expresses a continuity, a history, and a genesis. Shanzhai is a Cantonese term, originally used as a derogatory word for knock-offs — because people from rural mountain villages couldn’t afford real Louis Vuitton or officially produced DVDs of Friends. As a result, there was the cheaper, 山寨 version that was a mere imitation, coming from low-end, poorly run 山寨 factories.

David, along with the scholar Silvia Lindtner, has been researching the innovation ecosystem in Shenzhen for the past few years, and they have proposed the term “new shanzhai.” Part of the original shanzhai economy began with copying DVDs. Since copied DVDs couldn’t be played by name-brand players (an attempt to control piracy or simply due to DVD quality issues), a whole set of products were created to support the copied DVDs — and from there, a wildly creative ecosystem appeared.

This is the new shanzhai. It’s open-source on hyperspeed — where creators build on each other’s work, co-opt, repurpose, and remix in a decentralized way, creating original products like a cell phone with a compass that points to Mecca (selling well in Islamic countries) and simple cell phones that have modular, replaceable parts which need little equipment to open or repair.

Shanzhai’s past has connotations of knock-off iPhones and fake Louis Vuitton bags. New shanzhai offers a glimpse into the future: its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology. As startups in the Bay Area scramble to make buckets of money, being in this other Greater Bay Area makes it clear why there’s so much rhetoric about China overtaking the US. It is.

So writes Xiaowei R. Wang in her Letter from Shenzhen. Its a timely reminder of the way innovation and invention can play out when there are no secrets left to keep. Pragmatism implies that such extreme openness is not the only path open for intellectual property, but its success in the hyper competitive Chinese market does provide us with clear evidence that such a path is viable and feasible.

What can we learn from an informal market?

Documenting Busia Market, Kenya, January 2016 (Photo Credit: Niti Bhan)

I took this photo of Rinku taking photographs during our visit to Busia’s bustling cross border market as a means to document our own work documenting the borderland’s informal trade ecosystem. Sometimes we’re so immersed in our work that we forget to look up and recognize we’re participants too. Document everything, I tell people interested in the how and what of our work, you never know what will be important to capture until later in your analysis, usually when its too late to go back to the field for another look.

So, what can we learn from a visit to an informal market?

The subtext to that question would be “when using human centered design approach to observation and analysis as compared to a regular market visit”?

We’re looking for opportunities. We’re keeping an eye out for what might be missing, a gap or an unmet need. We’re watching closely, often sitting down for a while, or chatting up shopkeepers as often as the fancy strikes us. Its not just window shopping or wandering around aimlessly with a camera. Its entering the market place with a clear focus on learning how it works – what’s the organization of the layout? why are the all these products clustered over there? what is the underlying rhythm of the seeming chaos?

One visit won’t do if you’re looking for opportunities for innovating new products or services for one or more target segments of the market’s population. You might want to make a first recce to get a sense of the whole, and then come back to drill down further into a particular thematic area – is it the delivery men you’re interested in, or the logistics of egg transportation? Or, is it the fresh produce section where you’ve noticed greens wilting in the sun and think you have an idea for a cold chain solution – what would be its business model in this context?

Already, the ideas flow just from thinking about the market. Don’t let the chaos distract you from keenly discerning the system and the structure. That’s where the secret lies.

IKEA in India: Culture Centered Design Strategy

Its taken more than 10 years for single brand retail stores to enter the Indian market, and this year sees India’s first IKEA opening in Hyderabad. TS Ninan introduced their retail challenge succinctly, though he left me wanting more. And this snippet from an interview with the market opening CEO of IKEA in India (who, having laid the groundwork for 6 years, has now left – an interesting and thoughtful strategy right there imo) caught my attention.

In Europe, businesses look at the past, their systems and processes to plan ahead. India does not have a legacy. People don’t look backwards. Here you create the future as you go

Was IKEA’s product, design, and brand strategy going to be as human centered as reports of their 1000 home visits made it seem, or, as the groundbreaker Juvencio Maeztu implies, committing to India means a “culture centered strategy” – that too, one that is customized for each different culture, centered around a metropolitan area. For those who think India is a country, I like to remind them that its closer in concept to the EU, its a single market and currency, but each city has its own languages, culture, cuisine, and clothing, not to mention each state.

Ikea’s global designers meet artisans in co-creation workshops to handhold local artisans design products that meet global quality and design standards.via

I see familiar names in the design article. And I do like the photographs though I recognize my eye is taken aback because the years in Finland have influenced my aesthetic sensibilities closer to the Nordic norm. What I can say is that if this what the Swedes came up with after distilling down their hundreds of home visits, its an excellent integration of two extremes of design language. IKEA will have fun in India, and I suspect they intend to. The takeaway for culture centered design isn’t that “India” will receive one singular design aesthetic or product line but that each one of India’s cultures, both traditional and modern, will be catered to. That is powerful.

Moving from Unbranded to Branded

There’s a larger story here as well. The changes occurring in the Indian consumer market, for instance, and the increase in aspiration, purchasing power, and most importantly, design sensibilities. Back in 1990, during my first job after leaving the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I faced barriers to marketing industrial design services that I suspect don’t even exist now. Product design was imitable and not something one paid good money for oneself. There were corporates who understood our value as a design studio but they were few and far between. Now, IKEA’s entry isn’t into a completely untapped market – there’s competition that’s been born in the last decade, both online and off. And, finally, there’s the handmade artisanal informal sector, who have long copied IKEA products from hand me down catalogs. On the other hand, unlike most consumer brands entering the Indian (or the African market) IKEA recognizes the competition offered by the informal (unorganized, as its known in India) economy, and seems to have addressed it.

What’s interesting about the Wharton analysis from October 2017, is that all the issues it raises seem to have been covered now that IKEA is finally revealing its India strategy as the first store prepares to open this month.

Unlike my concerns back in 2006/7, this time I’m a lot more confident that IKEA will achieve something wholly unexpected in India. I look forward to visiting.

Tecno and Nokia: The tale of two brands

Chinese mobile maker’s original brand strategy succeeds in Africa: Transsion’s Tecno

This year, Nokia got shoved out of the top 10 most admired brands in Africa list, not bad for a company that had lost its way in emerging markets 7 or 8 years ago. As an old (in all senses of the word) Nokia fangirl, here are some of my favourite posts from the heyday of following Jan Chipchase around Africa vicariously through his blog. These days, I tramp my own paths in Africa.

Luthuli Avenue, Nairobi, Kenya, July 2012 [Photo Credit: Niti Bhan]

What’s interesting about this list is Tecno, a mobile phone brand that’s unknown outside of Africa. Transsion Holdings, the Chinese manufacturer that owns this brand has a clear strategy and focus. They own Itel and Infinix brands of phone in addition to the Tecno brand and focus only on the African consumer market. You’ll note Itel is listed at number 16 in the chart above.

According to a report released by market analysis company Canalys, Tecno, iTel and Infinix, which are all sub-brands of Transsion, overtook Samsung with a 38 percent market share in the first quarter, compared with a 23 percent share for Samsung. Via

Rather than the old Nokia strategy of a product aimed at every price segment whilst keeping hold of the mother brand, Transsion has broken branding rules by deploying three brands each with their own persona – Itel for example is very popular for its featurephones among border market traders in Kenya and Uganda due to its week long battery life. Few are aware of Transsion itself. Until its time to add up the numbers.

This brand and design driven original manufacturing strategy reminds me of the work Prof. John Heskett had done in the Pearl River Delta before his untimely death.

John, posing for me when we met in Singapore, back in 2009

This slide captures the essence of his teaching. I only have my class notes.

Transsion’s focus, rise, and brand strategy are all hints of his influence, either directly or indirectly in their approach and work. I’m very glad to be reminded of him today, and I recognize that I will be back writing on more of his work in the very near future.