Focus groups
Emmanuel and I took the prototype kit out, and continued focus group interviews in Mvuti, an hour’s drive outside of Dar. After blowing up two inverters and having to restock for tools, Jamie really hit the home running with the proto box. It now hosts our battery, two types of lights, a mobile charger and a radio. We have yet to find a person who didn’t offer to buy the kit instantaneously after seeing it!
Several villagers gave us an hour of their time. Discussing with them confirmed that doing forward-looking market studies with the bottom of the pyramid households is a challenge here: the low-income villagers don’t really know how much they earn on an annual basis, let alone spend on energy. This makes internalizing savings on an annual basis, and thus estimating the monetary value of our service, difficult. On the other end, every village official knows the spiel that appeals to Western funders. Doing interviews is very much like going through an aid agency annual report.
We tested the concept of doing distribution through dukas, the small kiosks that sell everything from grain to shampoo to the kerosene that pervades villages in Tanzania. After recognizing the upside of all-around access, the discussion went negative: the interviewees fear that duka owners will play with the prices and introduce inferior quality batteries to the cycle.
We keep running into this phenomenon. Tanzanians don’t seem to count on the long-term existence of businesses or projects. At the same time, the quality of products you find here varies dramatically. One of the outcomes is that our focus groups want to buy the product upfront, so as not have to worry about whether we’ll still be there the following day.
Nobody questions the value of our service. And the price is right too. Communicating our model and commitment to the end customer: here lies the rub.
- Jukka