How planting watermelons in a tech company didn’t get us fired?

Reaching out to new consumers far & beyond - "the watermelon farmer"

Way back in 2003 at Nokia, when we had launched a series of mobile phones to target the income-constrained & budget-conscious consumers with prices around US$ 100, we got a fantastic response from channel partners in multiple markets. The rest is history – at Nokia, we sold more than 225 mn units in about 3 years, gaining market-share in high growth emerging markets. And operators in the West loved it as it helped them get more consumers in pre-paid segment with lower subsidies.

While most competitors were following Nokia, it occurred to some of us that the market was shifting to smaller towns and rural areas. As phones became more affordable, operators expanded networks to cover more rural areas and a few innovative ones in Philippines and other markets invented pre-paid e-refills instead of traditional pricy physical recharge vouchers and lowered prepaid recharges from average $ 5 values to almost half a dollar, thereby making mobility affordable to a new class of consumers at the bottom of pyramid.

So, while we would hear from the research companies and industry analysts – “that the market is going rural”, we set out to understand these rural consumers ourselves.

We visited a village about 80 km away from Beijing. What started as a team development exercise turned out to be a sheer eye-opener. We first met a farmer who was looking for daily workers to plant water-melons. And we from the city were those “daily workers”. Well, planting water-melons was an experience. Couple of things surprised us – contrary to popular notion that farmers were men, our village farmer was a lady, whose husband had moved to the city to work as a migrant worker. And her kids preferred the city life of a factory worker to the village-centric family farming business! A few pre-conceived notions were broken by our ethnographic trip.

After working in scorching heat for couple of hours, we accompanied our lady farmer to her house to have some tea and snacks. Our local guide pointed to several people’s houses while crossing them - the funeral-manager, an insurance agent and the teacher’s house. As we entered our lady farmer’s house, we experienced several new things– an NBA calendar, an old TV, a jumbo-sized radio, an-old style coal heating house, an extended living room with a dining, sofa and a bed.

We then visited the village market to see the local stores. There were about 7-8 stores with the usual ones – the hair saloon, the grocer, the mobile electronic store which doubled up as a local soup shop, the chemist and others. While interviewing the electronic store, we found that no mobile companies ever visited the local store. Instead the store owner visited the neighbouring city to familiarize with the latest brands & phones and would bring back phones & accessories in different price bands keeping in mind the affordability in his village. No merchandiser or after sales service was available in the village. We very quickly realized that to drive awareness about Nokia and influence people in villages, we needed do something simple – educate about mobile phones, create brand awareness, distribute the products and open service centres.

So, Nokia’s 360 campaign mix for mass market phones started including educative calendars (teaching people how to use phones & its features) that people could keep in their homes, long-term durable POSM that didn't faster replacement, wall paintings and proximity marketing with mobile vans with video and fun & educative games. And we created a separate segmented media-mix for Nokia’s campaigns – to reach out to prospects in the low tier cities & rural areas versus audiences in metro & high tier cities.

Going beyond - developing an "audio-visual segmentation model" & "micro-distributors"

So, we prepared a simple “very visual” report of our watermelon planting trip and shared with our category teams in Helsinki and Copenhagen. And it went viral inside Nokia.  It got presented in a meeting attended by Nokia’s CEO.  We heard that he was impressed with our “ethnographic field trip” and he wanted this way of learning to be adopted widely.

While doing “a day in the life of a consumer” research was fairly common at Nokia, the ethnographic way to build deeper consumer understanding became widely adopted by our consumer insights team. The product concepting and validation research added a video section where qualitative feedback was taken from respondents and Nokia employees were asked to travel to research sessions whether in cities or in villages and stay with potential consumers to really understand the meaning behind what they had expressed and why they had chosen a specific answer in the multiple-choice answer.

As Nokia innovated to create its segmentation model, a video library was created which was curated from real life stories of prospects – to make the employees see, hear and literally feel the consumers living in different countries. Popular notions were busted, e.g., one of the segment – “Style leaders” was thought to be living only in developed markets vs. emerging markets. But research & consumer observations in real life scenarios clearly showed that in fact “Style leaders” segment was relatively bigger in some emerging markets than developed markets due to very aspirational nature of consumers in the developing markets.

Videos, images, insights, data and analysis became the real fact-based currency on the basis of which business cases got approved. Several new iconic phones were developed influenced by ethnographic work.

As Nokia advanced into rural areas, there were several innovations that Nokia did based on understanding consumer challenges – understanding the size of the opportunity by working with external consultants to do a fact-based market study, making products available far & wide by getting on-board micro-distributors - guys who would buy phones and go on a bike to neighbourhood villages & towns to place products & collect cash, joint campaigns with mobile operators & distributors via mobile vans to educate users & recruit retailers, reducing the size of packaging box by half so more boxes could be carried by the motor-cyclist distributor etc. But all along, we maintained a few things – making phones aspirational in designs, bringing new innovations, maintaining the highest quality and working closely with our partners & building our service network ceaselessly. 

More than just ethnographic studies - "building new revenue streams and loyalty"

At Nokia, we saw ethnographic research as a unique opportunity to interact with customers and prospects, to come up with new device and service concepts and strengthen the brand in local markets. In one of our next village trips in India, we were joined by our global CMO. As she patiently listened to the focus groups in the scorching 45 degrees in a make-shift research centre in a school, a translator was busy telling her about what each respondent was saying. We learnt how the lack of infrastructure between Delhi and this village barely 65 kms away was preventing progress and inclusive growth. E.g., a cooking gas cylinder took 2-3 days to reach the village unless the village folks got it by themselves after changing 3 vehicles including walking to reach the village. There was one school within a cluster of villages and farmers had to really bargain with the middlemen to get better prices.  So, while we were listening to the challenges that the lack of infrastructure had created, outside a queue of young kids had formed to catch a glimpse of my boss, the first foreigner to visit their village. 

The lack of infrastructure and information connectivity inspired us to dig deeper and come up with the idea of “emerging marketing services” – services that could be made available on a mobile phone. We created a series of services called Nokia Life Tools(NLT) with agriculture, education and entertainment content and optimized the user experience with location-sensitive content (local prices, area-based farming tips etc.), better UI and local languages. Launched in 2009, the award-winning NLT service (http://nokia.ly/17GYeEz ) is now available in multiple markets and has a 100 mn + user base. http://bit.ly/1bkBQot . Nokia Life Tool services helped Nokia build a lasting relationship with consumers month on month and generate a new revenue stream by purely focusing on existing base of consumers and genuinely creating a proposition that these consumers needed.  

Looking back, who knew that a watermelon trip could reap billions of dollars in returns over the years. But, there are not that many tech companies that allow their employees literally farming to sow, reap and grow business ultimately! My advice to companies - foster new ways of learning. And to employees - go out and experience it for yourself. Innovation will follow.

Did you experience new ways of learning about your category consumers? Share yours...