Hidden in Plain Sight—My Notes
I picked up this book when I was getting into consumer products after having spent all my life in the B2B world. It really helped me understand why consumers make the choices they do, what motivates or concerns them and how to understand them in the complete context. It is written by Jan Chipchase, who runs a studio that specializes in understanding consumer behavior in emerging markets and was at Frog Design previously. He has traveled the world, studying people of all nations, their habits, the ordinary things they do everyday, and it shows in the book.
Notes from the book:
How money gets transferred from husband in city to wife in village in Uganda:
Formal way — Transfer money, let wife know, wife takes taxi to nearest bank branch which is kinda far away and even then money might not have arrived because bank was processing
Informal way — send it with a bus driver, but cannot be trusted entirely
So what they did was buy prepaid card for one of the phone booths where they use mobiles for calling other people instead of normal phones — husband sends recharge code to this booth owner that they use for recharge. After the 20–30% commission they charge, they give remaining money to wife.
Of course this had issues as well. Booth owner didn’t always have so much cash, wrong person got recharged etc.
But this informal practice still worked much better than the formal ways — nobody saw it coming either — and it helped lead to a lot of mobile literacy and generating trust
In Bangkok young girls wear false braces as a status symbol — it doesn’t do anything for their teeth and is probably painful but when knockoff Gucci profits can be worn by everyone, this becomes the new status symbol.
To learn more about someone when they invite you home, it’s much better to look at their cupboards or refrigerator than artwork and showpieces. the brands they buy, the lifestyle choices they make and how it goes with/contradicts what they are saying. and unlike the bedroom which people in most cultures are hesitant to show, people are pretty open to showing what they have in their refrigerators.
a good way to understand people’s aspirations is to see the photo frames they have on fridges — with cars, with guns, jumping off mountains etc — they might not be able to achieve the aspiration but they can have a Ferrari keychain or a smaller model of it. that’s why people who can’t afford an iPod or iPhone at least buy the white earphones Apple sells.
why do we put out our phones on the table when eating dinner to “show off” but not cash or credit cards?
what happens when technology disappears or becomes increasingly smaller? what will we show off? freedom to use time the way you please it? free time? as society becomes more connected, the ability to switch off and disconnect becomes the new status symbol.
stages of adoption of a product — at a point of time, adult users of phones began buying phone for older people because the cost of a phone outweighed the inconvenience of these older people not having a phone and having to use a landline. or businesses give their employees phones, whether they want it or not. pressure on laggards to adopt something to stop inconveniencing the others.
the key factor in adopting an innovation is the number of peers that have adopted it — once it crosses the threshold, the person will adopt it. right from medicines to hybrid corn to family planning services. these thresholds of course vary among different adoption categories — early adopters are at 0 while laggards need a lot of peers.
laggards could be early adopters in their circles. for example — your mom could be a laggard according to you but in her circle, they all look up to her to see what she has adopted.
another adoption that we don’t think a lot about is when someone has mentally decided that they are going to buy an iPhone and are saving up to buy it. they are just living out the days with their motorola whatever but in their heads they are iPhone users.
and there are 2 different stages of non-adoption — not seeing a good enough use for an innovation yet or actively running away from it/saying I don’t want it at all. like how a lot of youngsters these days say — tv? I haven’t watched tv in 10 years.
porn has the power to drive technology adoption. When the Delhi RK Puram video came out, shopkeepers who had no idea how to use a phone or no idea about bluetooth learnt it just to be able to get that clip on their phones. checking out local porn markets is a quick and dirty way to understand tech adoption of a place.
to learn more about:
next gen display tech — go to Seoul
mobile money services — Kenya
Highly integrated services across ticketing, non cash payments, location based services — Tokyo
another thing to notice is how people hold their bags on a train or bus. in places like shanghai, people will clutch onto it really tight all day long. some people might even put their bags in front when on a crowded train — that shows a lot about how trusting are people of other people around them.
the best time to observe a city is at the crack of dawn. how shops open, how people exercise, what they wear, how kids go to schools, are people by themselves or in a group — if the locks used to shut the shops are big, again talks about the community and trustworthiness as a whole. also what do people do for breakfast.
good time to observe even dangerous parts of a city because the dangerous people are either asleep or too wasted to care letting the normal people in that part of the city go about their daily business much easier.
another way to know more about a city is to check out its signages. no fireworks, no playing golf in the park, all indicate that there is a chance that activity happens there, or is a way to limit the liability of the authorities — do not lean on the elevator or side rail of a tall building’s terrace. also see what phone is used on a do not talk on the phone signage to understand phone adoption — rotary phone, the nokia brick or an iPhone/new Samsung phone?
don’t just pick visual cues through photographs when researching a city, also make audio recordings of what you hear in the city and play that once back in the office.
when thinking about literacy, it should be more than just the textual literacy that the official definitions talk about. people learn how to visually recognize signs even if they can’t read or write, understand things based on sound, taste or smell — all of that is literacy. Nokia’s phones were used by a lot of people who were considered illiterate in the traditional sense of the word — (ones who can both read and write a sentence) — they were able to read or pick up visual cues but definitely not write.
Amazon Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Plain-Sight-Extraordinary-Tomorrows/dp/0062125699/
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