Thirty years of emerging market strategy: a review
When managers in the West hear about the emerging middle class of India or China, they tend to think in terms of the middle class in Europe or the United States. This is one sign of an imperialist mind-set—the assumption that everyone must be just like us. True, consumers in the emerging markets today are […]
Implications of the democratization of technology in rural Kenya
Kathanzweni, Makueni District, Kenya As many of you are aware, I spent the first three months of this year immersed in rural Kenya taking a closer look at household consumer behaviour. Among other thing, my observations led me to write the following: Thus, it can be said that as mobile phones rapidly overtook radio and […]
Airtel’s advertising in Africa
Spotted this Airtel poster in Kilifi, on the Coast of Kenya. Knowing that all of their advertising is done in Mumbai, India’s Madison Avenue, I’m curious about the amount of photoshopping this image must have required for the East African market. This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
Why South Africa should not be the entry point to reach Africa’s emerging consumer markets
This post is about something I’ve been musing upon for some months now, ever since my 2011 project which took me around rural and small town Kenya visiting with a variety of cyber cafes. Since then, many other well respected Kenyan professionals that I’ve spoken with, either in person or online, have confirmed my suspicions […]
Lost in transliteration
A couple of things caught my eye on this highway sign in New Delhi last week – toll roads are increasingly common, I hadn’t ever seen one in the city before (but then again I haven’t lived here since the late 1990s.) And the prepaid “Gold” and “Silver” levels have been transliterated in Devanagari i.e. […]
Design for the next billion 2012: What’s missing?
An upcoming project’s requirements led to the realization that there is a huge gap in design for the next billion (and more). The subsequent domino effect has left a lack in tools, methods, frameworks and thus, disciplines themselves, from the perspective of addressing the challenge of serving the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) population segment. […]
Aspiring changes; inspiring futures
I’ve been in New Delhi this past week for some work and its been interesting to see the shift in thinking and aspirations. The first few visits in the early 2000s showed the dramatic surface changes of a noisy market opening up to the rest of the world. Today it struck me that many of […]
Fool’s gold and cornflakes
@syamant pointed me to an interesting article on HBR yesterday “Are you targeting a phantom market?” which was at once amusing and yet quite sad in the spectacle that Kellogg’s Cornflakes has made of itself in India. How is it possible that Kellogg could envision building a $3 billion business in India, invest $65 million […]
Cookstoves matter less than the ladies who must use them
Photo credit: Goverdhan Meena, village Rawal, India Jan 2009 The Wonkblog covers findings from a randomized control trial on the impact of cookstoves in a blogpost titled “What cookstoves tell us about the limits of technology” where they share such insights as: So what went wrong? Basically, none of the earlier evaluations of the clean […]
Putting some real numbers to the world changing on the mobile
VentureBeat writes last week on How tech companies are waking up to global responsibilities, opportunities and shares this oft quoted example of world changing, As investment in social enterprise becomes more common, major brands and venture capitalists alike are learning how to make a difference without sacrificing their profit-driven missions.Nokia is a prime example. With […]
