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Connection-sharing Hides Larger Potential Market
While conducting an interview in India recently,
a Vital Wave Consulting researcher noticed a teenage
boy standing on a fence outside the house. The
interviewee explained that the boy was splicing the
wires so he could tap into his neighbor’s cable
connection to watch an upcoming cricket match.
Meanwhile, across the sea, the Arab Advisors Group
released a study claiming that, in Egypt, the
average ADSL Internet connection is
shared by three households. The group estimates
the number of connected Egyptian households at
around one million, effectively tripling the
official residential ADSL access figure.
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EMERGING MARKET SPEAKER SERIES |
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Segmenting Emerging Markets:
Challenges, Benefits, Methodologies
Interactive
teleconference on methods and
rationale for segmentation modeling
in emerging markets.
Speaker:
Brooke Partridge, Vital Wave
Consulting CEO
Date: May 13,
2008
Time: 8:00 - 9:00
AM Pacific Time
Details |
Belief in a one-to-one ownership and usage model
is an assumption that mature-market business
managers frequently (and erroneously) apply to the
emerging-market context. In fact, sharing cable
television signals, Internet connections, even
electricity, is very common in many emerging
markets. As with buying bootleg software and pirated
videos, stealing signals is not perceived as a
punishable offense, so much as a pragmatic way of
living on a limited budget.
Though the Egyptian estimates need validation, the
prospect of a user base that is three times larger
than official figures is notable. The pervasiveness
of shared services in India, Egypt and many other
emerging markets suggests a substantial, over-looked
market for online retailers, auction sites,
advertisers and hardware companies. Hardware vendors
have begun to capitalize on shared-usage models by
designing products with features for multiple users
(e.g.,
Nokia’s multiple phone books in one mobile
phone). To accurately determine the size of these
market opportunities, companies need a clear
understanding of unconventional usage patterns and
reliable methods for finding and validating market
size data and assumptions.
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