04.10.12 | Eight Practical Steps to Design for Emerging Markets (by Paul Polak)

For over 30 years Dr. Paul Polak, a 79-year-old former psychiatrist and founder a for-profit social venture with the mission of inspiring and leading a revolution in how companies design, price, market and distribute products to benefit the 2.6 billion customers who live on less than $2 a day.

The single biggest reason that the appropriate technology movement died and most technologies for developing countries never reach scale is that nobody seems to know how to design for the market.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve looked at hundreds of technologies for developing countries.

Some provided elegant solutions for challenging technical problems. Some were big and clumsy. Some  were far too expensive. Some of were beautifully simple and radically affordable.

But only a handful were capable of reaching a million or more customers who live on less than two dollars a day.

If you succeed, against all odds, in designing a transformative radically affordable technology, you still have addressed only 25 % of the problem. The other 75% is marketing it effectively, which requires designing and implementing an effective branding, mass marketing and last mile distribution strategy.

Any competent electrical engineer can design a beautiful solar lantern that provides enough light to read or cook by in a village thatched roof house. But designing it with the features that a poor family is willing to pay for, at a price providing them a 4 month payback from savings in kerosene, batteries and candles, is an entirely different matter.Designing a branding and marketing strategy and a last mile supply chain that will put it in the hands of a million or more customers is three quarters of the design challenge.

Eight Practical Steps to Design for the Market:

1. Interview 25 Likely Customers before you start.

2. Design to a Customer–Derived Target Price–point from the very beginning

3. Select the price/effectiveness Tradeoffs Acceptable to Customers to reach the target price

4. Create a Proof of Concept Prototype

5. If it Works, Put it in the Hands of at Least Ten Customers, learn  what’s wrong with it, and fix it

6. Design a Branding, Marketing and Distribution Strategy capable of reaching a million customers

7. Field Test the Technology and the Branding, Marketing and Last Mile Distribution Strategy in at least five different villages for at least four months, and modify it from what you learn

8. Scale Up Systematically to Reach at Least a Million Customers

To read the entire article, Death of Appropriate Technology II:  How to Design for the Market

Or watch video: Paul Polak on Practical Problem Solving