This blog contains a summary of the recently published Snapshot Publication on conducting consumer insights on adolescent girls in Bangladesh.
As announced in a previous blog post, BRAC Bangladesh has been awarded a GSMA mWomen Innovation Fund grant to create a mobile learning service aimed at improving employability for rural adolescent girls, in partnership with Robi Axiata. The service aims to teach English through mobile platforms – delivered through voice and SMS – with a view to helping users be more employable in major industries such as garment manufacturing.
The rural adolescent girls’ market is an as-yet untapped market in Bangladesh – and yet we know that there is a huge demand for mobile services for adolescent girls’ education, particularly for services linked to employment.
Find your customer
Robi and BRAC’s first challenge was that they need to carry out consumer insights research into adolescent girls, learn how to create the appropriate content, develop the platform, and then deliver and price the product for the target audience. This was easier said than done – reaching adolescent girls in Bangladesh is challenging. This is mostly because:
- There is limited existing data. Regulations in Bangladesh mean that anyone under the age of 18 cannot legally purchase a SIM, so mobile operators don’t have any information on this target group.
- They can be difficult to find. Social norms mean that adolescent girls are often still under the protection of their parents even if they are over 18 but unmarried. It is difficult to get access to them without permission from their parents, which in Bangladesh generally means their fathers.
Robi’s challenge was, how do you design a mobile service product for an audience you don’t know, and who are also hard to get access to?
By partnering with BRAC, an NGO, Robi had access to their extensive networks of adolescent girls’ clubs, and they also have buy-in from the parents because of BRAC’s long-established relationship with the communities.
Speak to your customer (and their parents and potential employers)
Through BRAC, Robi were able to conduct interviews and focus-group discussions with not only a diverse range of adolescent girls, but also with their parents – who were likely to be the ones who made decisions about willingness to pay.
Because it was a mobile service aimed at employment, Robi needed to speak to current employers to get a sense of what sort of skills they would value their future employees having, and how to incorporate these into the actual content of the mobile service. Again, through BRAC, Robi had access to key industry experts in the garment industry and government officials.
Don’t assume you know your customer – they might surprise you!
The employment industry that Robi and BRAC had initially intended to target was the garment industry – which employs almost 3 million people, 80% of whom are women, and the vast majority of these in entry-level positions.
However, the consumer insights researched revealed that:
- Adolescent girls were aspirational about their employment prospects – and wanted to either join the garment sector as mid-level managers rather than at entry level, or join the ICT sector. Generally, the adolescent girls did not see the manufacturing side of the garment sector as what they wanted for their career and their lives – they aimed higher.
- Parents wanted their daughters to use their education as a way of being socially mobile – if parents were to invest in their daughters’ education past the age of 16, they wanted their daughters to make the move from ‘blue collar’ to ‘white collar’ jobs and increase their social status. If there was a mobile education service that could help their daughters to do this, they would be willing to pay for it.
These two findings were extremely important for the design of the product – Robi and BRAC had not expected young women and their parents to be so aspirational and to aim so high in terms of career prospects. Robi then decided to include another industry into the research, and chose the ICT sector as the alternative sector, as it was rapidly becoming the second-largest sector in Bangladesh, and a sector emphasized through the Bangladeshi government’s Digital Bangladesh initiatives, particularly for women. The adolescent girls and their parents were very positive about this – it was identified as a sector that both adolescent girls and their parents aspired to working in and one that industry experts identified a need for English in order to enter.
Robi and BRAC have now decided to include the ICT industry in the mobile service, and create content geared towards this industry as well as the garment sector – highlighting once again the importance of conducting in-depth consumer insights research before designing a product.