Archive for May, 2010
The Importance of Being Branded
Its all about branding isn’t it? That’s all Gen-Y India cares about. We recognize a brand quite simply by its distinctiveness. We associate a certain virtue to them – comfort, trust, great service and so on. With such incredible potential to impact lives, social enterprises would do well to capitalize on their brand value. But do social enterprises understand the power of their brand? Villgro Fellow Jeanne Chen reflects on the learnings from the recent Sankalp Social Investment Forum in Mumbai, India.
One of the more practical sessions at the Sankalp Forum last week was on developing the brand of an enterprise, sponsored by the brand consulting firm Center of Gravity. Unlike many of the theoretical, overarching discussion panels of the state of the social entrepreneurship sector, this session provided concrete advice for start-ups on how to begin thinking about their branding strategy. Appropriate brand management is often undervalued by start-ups who have enough capital expenditures to worry about without also needing to hire a brand consultancy firm. Yet, it is an important consideration that can aid in gaining traction. The session provided a few simple guidelines for start-ups, which albeit obvious can still be useful points to begin with:
1. Understand the profile of your customers
Center of Gravity begins the branding process with a market segmentation analysis to understand the demographics and motivations of the customers. Enterprises often approach the market potential as one homogenous mass of consumers, whereas the customers are a diverse group with different motivations for making the purchase. For example, organic food consumers are not all driven to purchase for health reasons – some people go organic because it’s a perceived indicator of social status , and others buy organic because it’s more sustainable and eco-friendly.
2. Make your cause and message relevant
After understanding the consumption drivers of the primary customer segments, it’s important to create targeted brand messages relevant to each segment. People respond to messages with which they identify. The healthy eater would not respond in the same way to Whole Food’s upscale organic brand, whereas the status seeker would. It’s important to make sure that your brand message is aligned with your growth strategy if you need to target certain customer segments.
3. Provide a “So-What?” statement that connects your social impact to the customer’s choice
Consumers are lazy, so don’t leave it for them to make the connection between the product and the social impact. Demonstrate a clear link between the purchase decision and the environmental / social impact. For example, if your organic produce company directly helps small local farmers, have a story of that farmer on your package.
4. Do more with less by leveraging high profile endorsers
This piece of advice is a no-brainer. Every start-up would love to do more with less, and if there happens to be an influential person who is sympathetic to your cause, all the better. Center of Gravity gave an example of how they engaged famous Indian stars for a democratic campaign in Bangalore, but hardly every start-up has the good fortune of such endorsers. A better corollary to this particular advice would be to engage everyone and anyone who is willing to speak for your company. A particular CSR person may not have the power to make the purchasing decision, but they can influence and convince others in that position of power to make that decision.
5. Simplify the complexities of your enterprise
Every entrepreneur is very excited about their start-up and can talk about their company until the room runs out of oxygen. This isn’t an intelligent way to sell your company. It may seem that every detail is important, but the more you complicate the story, the less the audience and potential customer will retain. Condense those complications into a simple, memorable story that will stay with them after your conversation. Remember that the average attention span is <1 minute, which is why the pithier, the better.
For the most part, the advice given above is more easily applied to consumer facing products and services, whereas niche market companies have a harder time developing a strong brand equity that contributes significant value. I continue to struggle with creating a brand identity for my company, Coir Atlas, which operates in a niche market within the greater steel industry, but I think the lessons learned from this session are general enough to be applied. The key as with all marketing advice is in understanding how to adapt it to fit to your enterprise’s needs. Don’t just blindly apply all branding strategies and go chasing Bollywood stars to be the face of your product. Adapt these strategies and then apply them.
As originally posted on the author’s personal blog, Crossworlds.
Social Enterprise Education: What it covers and what’s missing
Social Enterprise education is an area of growing academic interest. Several universities already offer courses on the subject. Villgro Innovations Foundation has also been at the forefront of social enterprise education in India, having jointly designed and delivered a minor course “Innovation and Social Enterprise,” at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. But is social enterprise education covering all that is necessary, and how suited are courses offered in Western universities for the Indian context? Devyani Srinivasan, an indepdent consultant, explores.
In their article “Social Entrepreneurship Education: Is It Achieving the Desired Aims?,” it is surprising that authors Brock and Steiner do not begin with a discussion of what the desired aims of social entrepreneurship education are. This question is only addressed in the last paragraph of their paper, and that too, implicitly. The last paragraph says:
“…The ultimate question is what course content and designs are most apt to persuade students to develop a social mindset and become service-oriented leaders of tomorrow. The real test of our work is the choices and actions of our graduates. How many will choose a career path working for a socially entrepreneurial enterprise or starting their own social venture within one year, five years, ten years, and twenty years after graduation?”
To have students work for or start their own social enterprise are certainly two important aims of social entrepreneurship education, and were part of the list of aims that my colleague and I drew up when planning a minor in innovation and social entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M). In preparation for the course, we drew up a list of desired outcomes. These goals mentioned above correspond to numbers five and seven respectively on our list. However, I reproduce the entire list below in order to illustrate that there can be many other aims of social entrepreneurship education, that Brock and Steiner neglect to discuss.
- To enable participants to understand what social enterprise is an analyze different models of social enterprises
- To develop participants’ primary research and writing skills, through creating case studies of social enterprises
- To develop a body of case studies on social enterprises in India that can be used in subsequent years, through the participants’ assignments
- To enable students to experience the worlds of an innovator and social entrepreneur, through creating their own product or service and business plan
- To create champions of innovation and social enterprise amongst participants
- To create a pipeline of innovative products with the potential to create social impact, that students can further develop through Genesis (IIT Madras’ Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition), L-RAMP (the Lemelson Recognition and Mentoring Programme) or other avenues.
- To contribute to building a body of talent for the social enterprise sector
However, Brock and Steiner’s paper is methodologically very strong. They analyze 107 social entrepreneurship syllabi in the U.S. and abroad, the greatest number of courses analyzed to date. In addition, while they say that their list may not be exhaustive, they collected their data both through an Internet search, and from faculty listed in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management databases and list-serves. Each syllabus they collected was then coded independently by two authors. They had two rounds of “practice coding” in order to refine the category descriptions and make sure that there was agreement among the authors.
Brock and Steiner analyze 13 definitions of social entrepreneurship, and identify 7 concepts most often cited in these definitions. We conducted a similar exercise as part of the minor at IIT-M, but using fewer definitions. The concepts Brock and Steiner identify are social problems/needs, opportunity recognition, innovation, scalability, resource acquisition, sustainable business model and measuring outcomes. They then provide a brief paragraph describing each, and suggest that these are the most important topics in social entrepreneurship education. While this provides a useful guide to the topics that any overview of social entrepreneurship should cover, it could be refined further.
Amongst Brock and Steiner’s findings, I was most interested in the tabulation of the top fifteen articles assigned by instructors. What surprised me is that none of the literature on the Bottom of the Pyramid is included amongst these fifteen articles. My suspicion is that social entrepreneurship courses, which are predominantly offered by universities in the U.S. and Europe, also tend to focus on social entrepreneurship in the West. There may be good reasons for this, which include the availability of practitioners as guest faculty, and of service learning opportunities in close proximity. However, the questions I am left with are, “How transferable is the knowledge gained through these courses to social entrepreneurship in the developing world? Are the social entrepreneurship courses offered in developing countries substantially different from those offered in the West, either in terms of readings, or in other ways?”
Disclaimer: Devyani Srinivasan is a former employee of Villgro Innovations Foundation, the organization which jointly offers the minor course on Innovation and Social Enterprise with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.