Why I’m cautious about most mobile platform consumer research in Africa
StanChart’s price tracker rolled out in Nigeria is a great example of where and how mobile phones can really add value in understanding the African consumer market and add substantially to its scarce database. What concerns me however is the increasing promotion of the ubiquitous cellphone as the means to gather consumer insights for all […]
Why am I so excited about an African hair style app released on smartphones?
Darling, the pan African hair extension brand owned by Godrej of India, has just released an app in Nigeria aimed at helping customers choose their latest hair style on their smartphone. The implications are enormous, imho. Mobiles are ubiquitious. E-commerce in Nigeria is becoming commonplace. Smartphones are default. The African consumer market is sophisticated in […]
Retail ranking metrics vs Readiness for formal retail #AfricanConsumerMarket
Continuing the thoughts expressed by Yacine in the previous post, I’d like to explore these rankings and their value. We’ll use the example of Tanzania, ranked 5th by AT Kearney in their 2015 African Retail Attractiveness Index (ARDI). The ARDI states: Tanzania is starting from a low base: With only 30 percent urbanization, high poverty […]
First world trends: Financial inclusion, the unbanked, and the prepaid business model
The Economist explains just how expensive banking can be for the lower income population, even in the United States. Financial inclusion for the unbanked and underbanked must include cost/benefit analysis based on the limitations of income streams of those whom they hope to serve. The cost of ownership is often overlooked in current day literature, […]
Key Insights on the Reality of Rural India: Socio-Economic & Caste Census data
Recently, India released a selection of data from the 2011 Census of India – their focus was rural India’s socio-economic reality, primarily aimed at policymakers and programme designers. This was the first time the Government of the Republic of India has collected information on caste. The last such census was back in 1931, by the […]
Tsunami of change – design, brands, marketing and the mobile phone
In the 10 short months since I wrote on the market forces influencing the global mobile phone market, and the implications of the democratization of innovation whose early, weak signals I could already foresee, matters have come to a head. I had written: The locus of innovation in handset design, product planning and market strategy […]
3 Myths of Financial Inclusion
This article has been co-authored with Michael Kimani @pesa_africa Banking the unbanked is very popular right now, as financial inclusion is seen as a key milestone on the path to development. In parallel, a plethora of “cashless” or “cash lite” solutions have begun permeating the cash intensive informal economy. These can be broadly described as […]
Roadmap for reverse innovation – how to leverage context for disruption
Vijay Govindarajan and Amos Winter have an interesting article in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. They identify the barriers to successfully integrating reverse innovation from emerging markets into the product pipeline for mainstream consumer culture. Their key paragraph echoes the issues of people, pesa and place I’d written about earlier: Our research suggests […]
Why the Search for the Middle Class is a Waste of Time and Money
Once we stop focusing only on the search for the mythical middle class, we see the very real changes that have taken place, globally, over the past 25 years. The Pew Report in the previous post focused primarily on the middle income/middle class, overlooking in their haste that even this segment of the world’s population […]
Floating Upwards: The Bottom of the Pyramid Segment is No More
Pew Research Center’s latest results on global income distribution show some rather large shifts among the lowest income segments. The Bottom of the Pyramid or Base of the Pyramid (BoP) segment, defined as those who live on less than $2.50/day has just lost a significant percentage of the population. While one can quibble that $2.50 […]
