I attended the BoP- workshop wich was organised by Aalto university. The seminar was held by Peter Schartz and The workshop was in the beginning of the SGTSolar project so it gave me a lot to think and new perspectives for seeing our own project and especially the users of our product. Let me axplain first what BoP means:
As you can see in the photo the people that are normally seen as customers are the ones in the top of the pyramid. But as you can see the biggest population are the ones that earn less than 5 euros a day. So why the markets are so concentrated on the 0,5 billion? Why are the markets top-down oriented and no bottom-up oriented? These 4 billion are seen as numbers, but who are the people behind the numbers? What do they need? Can we produce the items they need? For these peolple the only certaninty is uncertainty. Irregular incomes, uncertainty about what tomorrow brings, but still- todays money money goes for todays spendings. Peple are inventing in future by repairing, renewing for maximizing the benefit of their belongigns. The BoP consumers mindset is about minimizing the risks, making tradeoffs in purchasing descision , stategic money management and the need for proof of the items performance. BoPs are brand loyal, which might sound wierd, but by understanding that the items that theu are farmiliar with are the ones that have proofed their performance. And when there is just a certain amount of money the risk of buying something even cheaper that doesn´t work is too high, so they´ll continue buying the more expencive, but safe items.
An invention is not an invention untill it´s adopted by it´s users- John Heskett
This is a challenge to our Solar Flower aswell. We have a design and an invention, but how will the users adopt it? Hopefully we will learn a lot from the Maailma kylässä festivals, where anyone can test it and give feedback. Although we had a critique on monday, but the real judges are the Solar Flower users.
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