Exploring strategies for increasing demand for point-of-use treatment options among low-income households

Despite myriad attempts to increase access to household water treatment solutions among households with inadequate access to safe drinking water, demand for such products remains surprisingly low. Why? And how can we change this? Social scientists and commercial marketers have been scratching their heads over this question for decades, and few have come up solutions that can be easily deployed or replicated. Marketers focus on the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion, adjusting each to foment demand for a product or service. Social scientists study individual, group, and social behavior to better understand why and possibly predict how to influence consumer and user behavior. PATH is using both approaches.

For us, demand generation centers first on the user—the person who would operate, clean, and maintain the water treatment product every day. Our user experience testing helps us engage with users so we can learn how they use a product, what they think of it, and how they would redesign it. Behavioral studies help us understand more about people and their culture, behavior, attitudes, and beliefs that drive decisions. Segmentation research helps us understand consumers, what motivates and inspires them, and how to best reach them with various products. Together, all these elements provide clues that might help us generate demand for household water treatment products among underserved populations.

Commercial lens

In the Safe Water Project, we look at demand through the lens of commercial markets, which means that marketing and product development efforts must be sustainable, and they must add value to the ongoing work of our commercial partners. Working with large partners like Hindustan Unilever Ltd. in India, PATH has contributed data from our household research and user-experience testing to help the company better understand the low-income market for household water treatment and safe storage devices. Our partners have expressed interest in insights related to peer influence, the role of men in purchasing decisions, and the ubiquity of radio.

With smaller companies, we are working side by side to test and adjust their overall market mix of product, distribution and sales strategies, promotions, price, and marketing messages. Our activities vary in each location depending on the type of pilot, partner capabilities, data from segmentation studies and household research, what channels of information people access, and what content has driven behavior in the past.

We are currently developing and testing various demand-related activities in four different countries (India, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Kenya) and have begun to share insights across teams and cultures.

Examples

Our most holistic demand generation project is located in Cambodia, where we have worked with local manufacturer, Hydrologic, to redesign a new exterior shell for the ceramic water purifier based on feedback from users in India and Cambodia. Because it is a new product, we are working with a marketing agency in Cambodia to build off of Hydrologic’s branding strategy, developing the product name and logo, packaging, instructions, messaging, and advertising campaigns. Much of the research to support our approach comes from a recent market segmentation study in Cambodia. Putting these data to use, the brand promotion campaign tries to trigger emotions or feelings that will move people toward wanting to purchase. Over six months, we will test different price points, promotions and trials, layaway plans, and sales and distribution strategies to better understand how the pieces fit together and whether we can boost demand for a product that has seen only 3.7 percent uptake in nearly a decade.

In Cambodia, we are introducing a new brand for the improved ceramic water purifier.

In PATH’s direct sales pilots in India, Vietnam, and Cambodia we are working with companies to overcome the challenges of finding the right sales agents and setting them up for success. In Uttar Pradesh, India, we worked with partners to design and pilot a direct sales approach working with locally based motivated young men to sell products to customers. Results provided rich information about entrepreneurs, community relationships and trust, and the use of mobile advertising campaigns. In Vietnam, we are training existing health workers to sell products, which will help us determine if a trusted source makes an impact on sales, particularly when given sales tools such as a pictorial flip-book. Similarly, in Cambodia, we are developing a flip-book to help sales staff guide conversations with potential customers.

In Kenya, our partner group Chujio is launching sales of a ceramic water purifier into commercial markets for the first time in a pilot with Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP) vendors in Nyanza and Western Province. To supplement our efforts to understand price and SWAP’s sales approach, PATH is supporting the development of a new promotional brochure and poster and promotion of the filter at self-help group meetings. PATH and SWAP are exploring opportunities to conduct community theater events in mid-2011 and to incorporate additional activities and tools such as flip-books, public demonstration stations, and consumer raffles.

Because household water treatment is relatively novel in many developing countries, we are also looking for ways to generate demand for the whole category of water treatment solutions rather than for a specific product. This means collaborating with multiple partners to develop messages around water, sanitation, and hygiene and measuring the impact of such efforts on uptake and attitudes.

In Vietnam, for example, PATH is exploring an opportunity to join forces with UNICEF, Lien Aid, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to engage an actor as a Goodwill Ambassador for Water and Sanitation and leverage that potential promotion for a WASH category campaign.

Expected results

Ultimately, our goal is to contribute evidence on how different kinds of demand-generation activities impact product purchase and use when integrated into various product and distribution strategies. To do so, we are conducting baseline and endline qualitative and quantitative studies that ask households where they heard of certain products, what they think of them, and what influenced their decision to purchase (or not purchase) the product. We are also interested in understanding the cost-benefit relationship of demand generation activities so that we can identify strategies that are more likely to be sustainable over the long term.

PATH’s goal is to identify a few successful strategies in the four countries where we are implementing demand-generation activities that can be tailored and replicated in other places and to generate evidence that can contribute to the growing base of knowledge on boosting demand for health-related products and practices.

Illustration: Hydrologic. Photos, from top: Hydrologic, MART.