Guest Articles

Tuesday
February 4
2025

Beryl Oyier / Eyerusalem Mitiku / Catherine Mwangi / Rakib Hasan Rabbi  

Building Better Business Advisory Programs: Five Lessons from an Inclusive Marketing Bootcamp

Inclusive business has emerged as a key development approach, enhancing the standards of living for low-income populations through commercially viable business models. At their core, inclusive business models involve integrating low-income communities into the value chain as suppliers, distributors, retailers or consumers. As this approach has gained traction over recent decades, there has been a notable growth in inclusive business advisory programs, offering non-financial support to help companies adopt and scale these practices.

These programs have been experimenting with diverse models for delivering advisory services, including online support, cohort-based training, tailored mentoring and coaching, and linkage brokering. For these programs and service providers, it’s essential to continuously learn which content and delivery methods best support businesses in meeting the needs of low-income populations and integrating them into their value chains. 

An external evaluation of an inclusive marketing bootcamp in Africa, run by Bopinc, provides insights into designing more effective advisory support. Part of the broader Alliance for Inclusive and Nutritious Food Processing program, the bootcamp involved five days of training followed by multiple targeted coaching sessions to food processors in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.

The aim was to train nutritious food processors to better understand low-income consumers, and to develop cost-effective promotional and distribution strategies to reach this underserved segment. The bootcamp also incorporated gender lens and innovation methodologies. 

Drawing insights from this evaluation, along with findings from Bopinc’s other initiatives, this article presents five key lessons for designing impactful inclusive business advisory programs. 

 

Encourage SMEs to speak more with low-income consumers

Unlike multinational corporations and large businesses, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can rarely afford market research to segment their consumers and understand their behaviours. The inclusive marketing bootcamp addressed this gap by offering tools and exercises for collecting insights from low-income consumers. In one such exercise, participating food processor SMEs conducted field visits to informal markets and interacted with low-income consumers and retailers to gather insights through semi-structured methods, including interviews and observation. This approach proved effective, allowing SMEs to contextualise real consumer data during the later activities in the bootcamp. 

Most of the companies that were interviewed during the evaluation shared that they were able to shift from a general market approach to more defined segmentation, with low-income consumers as a key target segment. This translated into actions aimed at serving this segment more effectively, such as using smaller, more affordable packaging that suited low-income consumers, supplying to smaller kiosks and shops, and implementing agent-based distribution systems to reach areas previously unserved by major players. Companies also recognised the value of regular communication with their consumers, and they are now gathering feedback more frequently than before.

 

Promote the use of localised approaches to consumer outreach

SMEs often struggle with budgetary and human resource constraints when it comes to undertaking marketing and promotional activities. This is a challenge that frequently emerges during the needs assessments of our advisory programs. However, the evaluation of the inclusive marketing bootcamp revealed that marketing and promotional activities don’t always have to be resource-intensive. The study showed that many SMEs were able to implement innovative, low-cost marketing strategies to connect with low-income consumers. 

For instance, some SMEs used social media accounts and collaborated with local bloggers to create brand awareness, while others participated in trade fairs and community events to showcase their products and gain customer feedback. Some companies also partnered with local shops to distribute their point-of-sale materials, such as flyers and posters. 

A representative from a food processor SME in Malawi described the impact of these types of outreach strategies: “Our marketing team focuses on having pop-up sessions in surrounding communities, canvassing local shops, as well as attending cultural and community activities. They are actually increasing our visibility as well as getting more customers, which we never had beforehand.”

 

Offer follow-up mentorship support

In private-sector-led development literature, there is an ongoing debate about the long-term effectiveness of business training programs. Whatever your stance on that question, our experience working with SMEs on inclusive business models across various programs has highlighted a recurring pattern: While these companies appreciate the knowledge and skills gained during the training sessions and feel comfortable making plans for inclusive marketing and distribution strategies, the real challenge lies in implementation. 

More often than not, the feedback from participants in these programs indicates a strong need for extended follow-up and mentorship support to help these companies put some of their plans into action. For that reason, our inclusive marketing bootcamp was followed by some light coaching sessions, which were greatly appreciated by the companies.

Yet the need for more structured follow-up and mentorship support was emphasised strongly in the evaluation research. This highlights the critical role of soundboarding, where participants receive feedback and guidance as they implement changes, evaluate results and scale their efforts.

 

Provide sector-specific training — and time to process it

Bopinc’s inclusive business advisory support often involves the use of lively case studies to inspire and teach from practical examples. But while these methods have been highly valued by companies in various programs, we have also received feedback about the need for more sector-specific training and case studies. 

During the evaluation of our inclusive marketing bootcamp, companies suggested developing industry-specific training modules and case studies tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities in different sectors. For instance, the challenges faced by the dairy sector could be very different from those in the flour/grain sector, in terms of sourcing and product development and distribution. 

Several companies also felt that our inclusive marketing training was too intense and tightly packed into a short period of time. This limited their ability to process and test their knowledge of one module before learning the next one. As the representative from a food processor in Zambia put it, “The training was good, and it was, I would say inspirational… but because it was so intense, like there was so much that was packed in such a short period of time, it was like you were force-fed information.” In light of this feedback, it’s advisable to spread content over a longer period, to allow participants to better absorb the materials.

 

Make peer-learning and networking a core component of the program design

The importance of fostering peer-learning and networking among participating companies emerged strongly in the evaluation study. This lesson has also emerged from our work with SMEs, micro-entrepreneurs and other companies across various other programs. 

In one of these programs, we actively encouraged the cohort of trainees to stay connected through social media. During the training, we asked them to create a self-governed chat group on a social media platform they were already familiar with. After the training concluded, we encouraged the participants to keep communications active and use the social media group as a resource for sharing knowledge and experiences. (For more information on this program, see the report we published last year.)

Experimental impact evaluation has shown that businesses that participate in peer networking groups experience higher levels of innovation, more effective business practices and even higher profits than those that don’t. These findings highlight the importance of embedding peer-learning and networking into the program design, rather than treating it as an afterthought.

This article has presented some broad lessons from Bopinc’s work on inclusive business advisory support. But for these types of learnings to have a widespread impact in the inclusive business space, they must be applied by more of the advisory programs operating in underserved communities. As the landscape of this support continues to evolve, it’s critical for programs and service providers to learn and innovate approaches that add value, ultimately empowering businesses to create lasting impact for low-income populations.

 

Beryl Oyier is Country Director – Kenya, Eyerusalem Mitiku is an Impact Officer, Catherine Mwangi is an Impact Measurement Specialist, and Rakib Hasan Rabbi is the Head of Impact Measurement and Learning at Bopinc.

Image courtesy of Bopinc.

 


 

 

Categories
Agriculture, Social Enterprise
Tags
business development, business education, food security, global development, impact measurement, marketing and advertising, MSMEs, research