Articles by Josh Cleveland
-
Tuesday
March 12
2013The Toyola Money Box: The BoP marketing tactic you wish you’d thought of
It’s just a condensed milk tin with a hole in the top – empty, collected from garbage dumps by local kids.
But slap a masking tape label on it that reads “Toyola Money Box” and you have a piece of BoP marketing genius - a tactic that helps each Toyola salesperson sell around 4,400 cook stoves in rural Ghana a year.- Categories
- Technology
-
Tuesday
February 26
2013Changing Our Priorities: When we don’t actually want what we ‘need’
More organizations are spending less time on the tired “it’s good for you, why don’t you understand?” approach to poverty alleviation. The age-old question – how might we deliver a product or service that people “need” and want? – is being answered in new and interesting ways.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Thursday
December 27
2012The Best of 2012: Using Mobile to Reach Scale
About Ugandan 21,000 households are currently registered to receive SMS messages from Living Goods. With an average household size of five people Uganda, where Living Goods operates, of five people, the company is already reaching over 100,000 clients in the first three months since the platform launched. On the one day I visited Living Goods’ Kampala office, by mid-morning tea time over 320 expecting or recent mothers had already received an SMS text.
- Categories
- Technology
-
Guest Articles
Wednesday
September 5
2012Overcoming the Challenges in Mobile: Living Goods hopes to follow in the footsteps of Amway, Avon, and Tupperware
With a core business in health care sales, Living Goods is no stranger to behavior change. Despite the challenges to rolling out a new mobile system to a sales force of 250 women, most over 40 years old, 60 percent of who had never used SMS before, the organization is seeing some early successes.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
-
Guest Articles
Tuesday
March 20
2012From ‘A-Ha’ to Impact: Making it to Market
But like many “breakthrough” innovations such as digital cameras, tablets, and Apple’s pinch-and-zoom screen function (born in 1983), social impact technologies often languish before really reaching the market.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
-
Wednesday
February 15
2012A Responsibility and a Market: Why Danone May Represent the Future of BoP Business
Eric Soubeiran leads the company’s BOP business efforts as head of Danone’s newly launched BOP Business Unit based in Gurgaon, India. In our recent conversation, Soubeiran described in detail Danone’s trajectory related to BOP markets beginning with the launch of Fundooz, a yogurt product for kids in India.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
-
Tuesday
December 13
2011Why the Failure of the Nano Has Been a Success
The Tata Nano’s launch failed by nearly every measure, including highly publicized flame outs of just purchased cars. Yet the $2,000 Nano gave companies thinking about emerging segments in emerging markets something to talk about. The hype caused firms of many sizes and industries to plan or imagine how their products might someday reach the poor.
- Categories
- Finance
-
Wednesday
September 28
2011Reinventing the Mobile Market in Mexico
Without a credit card, bank account, or official employment history, mobile providers are unwilling to take the gamble on providing a post-paid monthly plan option to Mexico’s poor. It sounds a lot like what many poor people encounter when attempting to obtain a loan. It’s in this environment where the founders of Finestrella saw an opportunity.
- Categories
- Technology