A wonderful week has begun after the Easter vacation in our town. Several activities have been retaken and plenty of watercolor paintings are on our journey. We hope you are already immersed in all your working and home activities too.

Today we are traveling to India. Particularly to 5 of its poorest states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Our example is how can we help a team of entrepreneurs who are planning to manufacture an organic natural bathing soap with 20 Indian natural ingredients in a bar format. We wish to target married women from 20 to 45 years old, living in the rural zones of these 5 Indian states. The majority (around 90%) of women who live there, belong to the ST, SC, and OBC group castes. Read the slides to understand the meaning of these groups. This is our desired customer segment in Rural India. Every week we will travel to a new country or community, in our quest to help you how to build value propositions from everywhere, with a new integral value approach.

Our work during the week has been to properly contextualize all our readers in the complexities of selling bathing soap to India, especially to these customer target groups. We have prepared our masterclass with a different overview. Since our goal is to learn to practice how to prepare value propositions, we will leave you to do it alone, by yourselves over the weekend. Then on Monday, I will upload the solution (how we created the CVP version 1.0, and our strategic reflections). We decided to do it this way, so you can practice at home, by filling the slides over the weekend. There is no point in offering you the answer before you try to do it by yourself.

The context of this exercise includes all the basic information (slides 1-22) that may guide you to prepare the CVP version 1.0. Feel free to make mistakes. It will be meritorious for you if you do it before I upload our own solution. Let´s play that you are one of the entrepreneurs who wishes to sell bathing soap in Rural India. Feel free to download our slides, share them with your friends or colleagues, print them, and write notes with your pencils or pens over them. Visit our bibliography for supplementary information. We recommend you fill in all the slides that are ready for your notes.

If we don´t practice to make mistakes, we won´t be able to learn.
This example is embedded in the context of Rural India’s situation before the COVID-19 pandemic. Things may have ameliorated about sanitation and water in these communities, but all of us need to acknowledge that many communities all over the world still do not have private bathrooms at home, or do not have water facilities “on-premises” either. If we wish to sell bathing soap to people without access to water, this is like trying to sell a pair of glasses to someone who is blind; or trying to sell alcoholic beverages to a teetotaller (someone who abstains or never drinks alcohol because of personal, cultural or religious reasons).

Returning on Monday to upload our solution. We returned today (Monday 8th of April) to upload how we drafted the first Customer Value Proposition for this case.  We truly expect you will be animated to compare with what you did over the weekend.

The following slides include our solution (uploaded on Monday 8th of April at 10:26pm CST). Our strategic reflections are included in all our notes and slides from the 24 to the 45. We also have replaced the PDF set of slides with our whole solution and more strategic notes.

Strategic Reflection about this case.
The entrepreneurs in this case are quite special. They want to do good by doing business in poor communities. Their spirit of solidarity has raised the standards of the FMCG industries in other projects in Latin America, and they truly wish to make an impact on the poorest communities of India. By selling high-quality soap at affordable prices, and by selecting to utilize the local suppliers, the project is committed to becoming a success for the women farmers who will be trained to produce organic raw materials of elevated eco-certifications in the world. The entrepreneurs wish to leave the profits of the value chain in India, not just by installing the manufacturing efforts and using the local community for vending and logistics. They also wish to do good with their profits, by procuring projects involving supranational organizations (such as the World Bank), attracting international donors, and inviting the Indian local governments to commit to the projects. To avoid corruption, a supervising entity linked to Transparency International, the European Union, and the United Nations will supervise every single transaction of the investments in which they will act.
In addition, for the sake of the example, the entrepreneurs have hired Eleonora Escalante Strategy to advise them in decision-making when considering an integral corporate strategy for this initiative. Our role will be ample: community building, creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping women who are the poorest of the poor to build up their love for themselves and their self-esteem; visualize a way in which they can contribute beyond the soap, to truly care for cleansing and keeping the groundwater sources in the 5 states of their operations; investing in the transition of basic or limited improved water sources without premises to the safely managed water access facilities (SMWA piped private bathrooms) in the communities where they wish to sell their organic marvelous bathing soap bar.

The willingness to do something beyond economic terms. This example also shows us the entrepreneurs’ main concern to build a circular economy business model, their CVP version 1.0 is clearly robust enough to indicate these aspects. The entrepreneurs’ additional intentions include the project of helping women of the ST (scheduled tribal), SC (scheduled castes), and OBC (other backward castes) who do NOT read or write, to reach total literacy in their communities by 2035. Finally, from the CVP 1.0, a new project emerged by observing the needs and wants of the people: the “Refreshing our Soul” project, which wishes to prepare smart girls to attend universities on a merit basis. I invite you to read all the slides that we have created for you and do not forget that this is just our version 1.0. It will require several loops and tests, and it will be modified several times in the context of the business model. For the time being, we feel content to show you a new way of thinking when building value propositions for the needy and the underprivileged in developing economies. It is possible to change our mindset frames when doing corporate strategy. A strategic transformation to bless others with our intentions and undertakings.

Announcement.
Please remember that we publish our frame-of-reference slides only on Fridays, and we upload our strategic reflections later. As of today, I will leave you with enough homework for the weekend, and on Monday we will upload our solution. Let´s see how it will work. We always publish at the latest before 11:59 pm (CST). The 11th episode is about a computer peripheral equipment manufacturing company, and it will be published next Friday 12th of April.

Musical Section.
This saga is about improvement, amelioration, upgrading, and the advancement required in the theory and practice of value propositions. Value propositions are the first step in our business modeling frameworks. If the value proposition is improper, then our business model is mistaken. Therefore, we will also share the music of classical progress that marked a before and after in the history of music.

Aujourd´hui we will remember composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), an Austrian composer of Romantic music best known for his songs, symphonies, piano, and chamber music. Schubert’s career lasted only 15 years (since he died at 31). One of his best compositions is the Ave María. Originally, this piece’s name in German was “Ellens dritter Gesang” or “Ellen’s Third Song“ in English. This is one of 7 songs Schubert composed in 1825 based on texts by the Scottish poet Walter Scott. This oeuvre is famous and has been performed mainly for weddings. By the way, I would love to include it in my wedding too.

We include two videos of this beautiful art piece, one played by the London Symphony Orchestra, and the second one, by the Metamorphose String Orchestra.

Thank you for reading http://www.eleonoraescalantestrategy.com. Blessings see you on our next episode.

Sources of reference and Bibliography utilized today. All are written in slide 43-44

Disclaimer: Eleonora Escalante paints Illustrations in Watercolor. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. All are used as Illustrative and non-commercial images. Utilized only informatively for the public good. Nevertheless, most of this blog’s pictures, images, or videos are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images unless otherwise stated.

Published by eleonoraescalantestrategy

Corporate Strategy Artist, San Salvador, El Salvador View all posts by eleonoraescalantestrategy