#Distribution
“If people don’t trust your product they will never buy it. The only way you can get them to try it is to make advertisements on TV, or to make a partnership with a big company. Obviously, the ads were very expensive for me, so I decided to find a big company which can help me sell my product.”
-Kahitouo Hien
Getting distribution right often requires finding multiple partners and getting them to work well as distribution channels. Get that right and those partners can help you build trust, get feedback from your customers, grow your customer base, and more.
##How Culture and Economics Define Distribution
Musenga Silwawa may have developed his precision fertilizer applier in the Zambia Agriculture Research Institute, but he has to sell it to farmers on the ground. For him that meant utilizing existing channels, working through agricultural coops and in collaboration with seed companies.
Beyond the trust and distribution channels those brought along, the farmers needed hands on experience to feel ready to buy the product. Knowing the product should work in theory means very little to them.
Birkina Faso, on the other hand, presented a unique set of challenges for Kahitouo Hien’s caterpillar selling business. The West of the country is where they are traditionally eaten. However, this is also the poorer and less populated part of the country. In the center you have the capital city and most of the middle class, yet these people have less of a tradition consuming caterpillars.
Kahit has to choose between going where the buying power is and where the demand is. Or did he? Those were both compromises Kahit’s business couldn’t afford to make, so he sought a national distribution channel which would make his product accessible in both markets as well as creating trust in his product.
That trust was essential to get the traditional caterpillar eaters to buy them from a new channel as well as to get people who don’t traditionally eat them to try them. The best way to begin tackling both problems for Kahit was to find a trusted national chain.
Kahit chose to work with Total, a petrol station chain with around 50 locations all over Burkina Faso. Working with them would solve the trust problem and make his products available everywhere. Musenga gave hands on demonstrations in those coops, giving his customers easy access to the hands on experience they need to be willing to buy.
##Negotiating with a Big Distributor
Musenga was lucky enough to be working in an important Zambian academic institution, making establishing his relationships with farming coops relatively easy. But when it came to approaching Total, Kahit faced several problems. First, he was unknown to them. Second, this was a foreign chain not used to carrying insect products. To overcome the first challenge, Kahit used a classic method for getting around problems presented by using his existing social networks. Having studied in an international school, he talked to the head of the school about getting an introduction.
It worked, and he was introduced to Total with a good recommendation. Now, it was time to get their trust. Kahit obtained all the necessary documents stating that his products were safe, had the proper shelf life, and were able to be legally sold. Navigating the bureaucracy of getting those documents was difficult, but once he know how to do it, the process became much easier.
Total agreed to try distributing his caterpillars, now it was time to use that distribution chain to build his customer base and prove his concept to Total.
##Making Distribution Work
Kahit knew he needed to leverage the Total as a distribution chanel to get feedback from his customers. He did this by finding trusted salespeople already working at the stations and having them. Those salespeople encouraged customers to try the caterpillars and had them fill out questionnaires afterwards. Kahit himself even cooked caterpillars in some stations to distribute to customers. Together, they listened to customers reactions and learned from the feedback.
However, Kahit didn’t only rely on Total alone, there were still real advantages to using more direct distribution channels in the west of the country. He employed around 20 students to sell the caterpillars there, helping to develop his brand in the spaces where people of that region are used to buying caterpillars.
The combination of these two approaches means that Kahit is now selling around 10 tons of caterpillars a year, has avenues through which he can experiment with new products and gather information about them, and is building trust and brand recognition. Simply relying on one or the other network wouldn’t have brought him all of the advantages his current system has.
Kahit’s next step is to find international distribution for France and Belgium. That presents an entirely new set of challenges, but his lessons from working with Total are serving him well. For Musenga, 40,000 preorders are ready to be distributed through reliable channels.
Can you relate to the stories we told here? How is your experience different? We’d love to hear from you. Your questions and comments are what will help us make better lessons in the future.