You can say that's the basic BoP marketing mantra, save them some time or make them some money. This great insight comes from Dr Rohan Samarijiva of LirneAsia in Sri Lanka whom I heard speak in Singapore a couple of years ago on the findings from their recently concluded Teleuse@BoP survey.
How much time do you think a bank in a laptop would save millions of rural customers living just outside of a day's walk of the nearest bank branch?
How much money can be (saved) if that time was put to income generating activities instead of being sunk into waiting for a bus to pass a lonely roadside stop?
That's only one example of where time and money - the two key elements of the constant uncertainty which characterizes daily life for those at the base of the social and economic pyramid - can make the difference between one frugal meal a day and perhaps two full ones.
Quoting from my post on Dr Samarijiva's talk written back in October 2007,
Apart from the data, Dr Samarijiva added that there was immense potential for innovative and profitable business models at the BoP but service providers needed to get out of the consumption game and into the production game. That is the existing business models on the mobile platforms are based on consumption by the user - of data, infotainment, ringtones et al, not on improving their productivity, income or saving them time or money. An example he gave was a villager making a call to receive information rather than taking a bus or walking to the nearest public phone service.
At this point I could link to a lot of writing supporting this basic contention but choose to follow up with a collection in the next post. Instead, I'll add a thought that struck me when I found that my 3 month project on the Prepaid Economy using design research methods to uncover how those on irregular incomes managed their household expenses resulted in findings similar to rigorous academic studies that took two or three years to conduct. That saving time and money for the BoP didn't just have to apply directly to services and products meant for them, that we could bring this lesson back and apply it to our product development and strategic planning frameworks.
We can focus on models of production - those that provide value beyond entertainment or filling up of "leisure" hours and not simply get distracted by models based on consumption. I think we can agree that the time is ripe right now for this shift.
Great article...I'll share it with my guys here in our community. Thanks for a nice info.
Daniel Roberts
Posted by: remittance philippines | October 28, 2009 at 05:08 AM