Building a business case for focusing on women at the base of the pyramid (BoP) is difficult for many mobile network operators (MNOs), primarily because:
- Product design and segmentation fail to account for gender differences. New offerings are designed primarily around delivering additional value to customers through lifestyle-enhancing products related to mobile money, health services, education, government services, or access to utilities. This segmentation approach often fails to take into account differences in how men and women consume these products and services, despite the potentially substantial increase in uptake from tailoring products to women.
- Women have very different needs across segments. Rural women working in agriculture may have different preferences than women working in urban areas. For example, BoP women working in a rural area may value health services that are unavailable in remote geographies more than urban women who have access to health facilities. Instead, urban women may have a preference for mobile money products that allow for a greater degree of convenience and safety. As a result, understanding consumer preferences of women on a more granular level is essential to capturing value from women by MNOs.
Recognizing these common pitfalls, the team at Group level engaged in two key opportunity identification activities:
- Identified opportunities where engaging women was a key success factor. The team focused on geographies and opportunities where engaging women was beneficial from both a CSR and a commercial perspective. This analysis led to Orange identifying major projects such as large mHealth deployments in Mali and Senegal, including mother and child remote consultations, health service appointment reminders, health tips and advice.
- Revisited customer data surveys with a specific gender lens. Rather than implementing an expensive new customer survey, the group revisited large-scale, regional surveys that included quality of service, brand tracking and segmentation. With the help of the GSMA mWomen team, Orange disaggregated results by gender and used a dedicated team to analyse the existing data and identify key specificities of women across markets. (For more information on key principles for bringing a gendered approach to market data analytics see the GSMA mWomen Marketing Handbook)
Orange’s approach to addressing the needs of women is only nascent amongst most MNOs globally. Their approach not only resulted in the right technical approach to addressing women’s needs, but also ingrained a new mentality amongst the management team that included women as a critical link in the value chain. For MNOs interested in replicating Orange’s success, a few critical insights are important when developing a mWomen program, including:
- Identify the right team internally that consists of a core project team and advocates who see the business value of including women at both the global and local levels
- Get your segmentation right to address heterogeneous needs of women across the customer base, e.g., rural vs. urban
- Vet external partners vigorously to find organizations that can meet your needs through bringing adequate expertise and resources to the table
- Harness the entrepreneurial power of women through agent networks, retail chains, and new distribution models.
This blog is based on experience sharing from Orange Group Catherine Flouvat (Corporate Social Responsibility, Africa and Middle East) at our GSMA mWomen Working Group meeting in Nairobi in July 2013. Should you be interested in learning more about our Working Group, please visit our Working Group page.