This past Saturday, the class took a trip up to the Mountain Top campus in order to have a conference/retreat meeting. It was incredibly helpful because it gave us time to plan out the next year as a team, as well as learn about how to handle cultural issues and challenges we haven’t considered yet.
Some of the cultural issues may affect our group project is the types of foods that they do and don’t consume. For example, in Sierra Leone families don’t allow boys to eat bananas because of the fear it may affect their personal growth in negative ways. Additionally, they do not give eggs to their children because they fear their kids will grow up to be thieves if they do. These are just some cultural aspects that we have to be mindful of when we are creating our food-based product as well as marketing it to the kids and their families. Another cultural issue that we have to be careful of is the maternal instinct and influence in the household; such as grandmothers. Moms, especially new moms, rely heavily on their mothers to help guide them through the process of raising a child. If the grandmother raised the kid a certain way, chances are, the mom will do the same. With this in mind, we cannot market a product targeted towards children if the mothers won’t allow their children to consume the product. So we have to be able to gain their input on the product and how we need to change it, if at all. And lastly, another cultural aspect we have to be careful of is just being careful of how we market the product in general. Our goal is to add some kind of incentive to the product to make it more marketable to the kids, but we don’t want market mishaps like the ones we learned about in class. The Cocoa-Cola one where it was read incorrectly from right to left, as well as the insult on the Middle Eastern religions from the way it was written. When it comes time to market the product, we will just have to be extra careful in that department.
One of the cultural aspects in Sierra Leone that can be leveraged to help market is the street vendors. The street vendors in Sierra Leone are like the ice cream man here in the United States. When Khanjan told us this, we knew that this was the market we would work with because kids are always begging to have extra change to buy whatever the street vendors are selling; and they come at least a few times a week, if not every day. The other two cultural aspects that can be leveraged are the idea that children enjoy eating street foods. This gives us an immediate target market. And lastly, another cultural aspect that we can manipulate to help our product succeed is being able to sell more than one product. Naturally, the Sierra Leone locals enjoy buying cakes and using flour, so we are thinking about also selling the flour and cake mix to ensure the product has even a larger market area.
These types of cultural sensitivities have been seen here at home as well. One of which is Chick-Fil-A. They are a well known, Christian establishment, and they pride themselves on upholding those same values. They have been involved in a few legal technicalities because of the way that they treat certain people who don’t abide to their religious guidelines; such as those in the LGBTQ+ community. Additionally, another example of how these are experienced here in the United States is there was a commercial for a cleaning brand and in their ad, the people who used their brand came out of the wash clean and white. The person they showed using the competitor’s brand was of the African American dissent and this did not go over well with the public. Finally, the last example is certain political advertisements. People in a stance of political power have to be very careful with how they say things and what they’re seen doing. Otherwise, they could be asked to resign; such as the governor in Virginia.
Now creating a product in Africa is much different than in America and because of the different contexts, we will run into different challenges compared to if we were marketing in the United States. One of the biggest challenges that our team is running into is cost. Because most families in Sierra Leone live off of less than $2 a day, our goal is to sell these muffins for $0.25 or less. Because of this, we must be able to manufacture the product for around $0.20 so there can be some kind of profit to the companies selling. Also, another challenge that the African context is presenting is the lack of machinery and technological resources that we have here in the US. For example, we have to find alternative ways of mass producing and distributing the products because it’s not like we can just import these giant cooking factories into Sierra Leone. And lastly, another challenge that it presents to us is actually getting word of our product throughout the country. There really isn’t much ways to advertise the product like there is in the United States. One person has to like the product enough to convince others to buy it as well. That could prove challenging if we don’t get the right people.
In addition to different challenges arising because of the African context, there are different resources as well compared to the American context. One resource that is different in Africa is they provide us with a natural means of transporting our product around the country. Because the street vendors are already in place, we don’t have to worry too much about how our product will be distributed and how people who may not have such easy access to the local market will get ahold of it. Two other resources we have in Sierra Leone are the farmers and the local economy. We believe that because there is a lower economy and lack of jobs, our ability to provide jobs into the economy will get more people want to help produce these muffins for the kids.