Reflection – Journey Mapping

Challenge & Selection

Journey Mapping is a tool that not just gives us sufficient data to work with but  it helps us build a friendly relation with the customer because of which we get  to know there real concern. I work with a team of 15 people all around the age  of 20-25 and we all have our flaws. We sit in group of 3 and have stress release  sessions and see if we can connect with each other & do something about it.  So in brief Journey mapping is a proved tool among a small team and is quite  effective to collect relevant data regarding the issue at hand. Now we work  with a lot of women during our work like house wives, working mothers, single  mothers and most women belong to middle class category of society. We talk  to them at their convenient time & place and make sure to find out the real  concern that bothers them.

Application

Let me share one of our cases where without Journey Mapping  maybe we  couldn’t have find a better way to deal with the situation. So we used to  conduct an event called Pinkathon which is a marathon event especially for  women & girls all over India. So this event was a huge success as we started in  metro cities of India at first. But later on when we shifted to do these events in  tier 2 & 3 cities we didn’t find the same kind of response as we found in metro  cities. So after a lot of discussion with the team we needed to find the real  reason behind it so we picked 2 such cities and had a meeting with local  women support groups, women society groups etc to seek their help in finding  a solution. So together with their help we found a way to communicate with  the women in their localities and such. And while we met with quite a few  women during this research we came up with two repeated reasons of  concerns like that people don’t think Marathon as an event for women as they  have a perception that women have to follow a certain kind of dress-code in  order to participate and which doesn’t sit well with quite a few women and  their families. Secondly, when we say Pinkathon it feels like something big and

something a middle class woman can’t approach that easily. So we discussed  among ourselves and wanted to make the women comfortable and we came  up with 2 ideas and to see whether they work we held few campaigns in public  places like malls, society grounds, stadiums etc. So the first idea we came up  with was a 1 km walk Saree race as most of middle class women are fine with it  as they are comfortable in it and started public awareness about fitness and  how dress code or looks should not stop women to be fit. And the second idea  was to name the event held at tier 2&3 cities with their respective city name  like “Nashik Going Pink“, ”Vizag Going Pink”, etc so that people will feel more  affiliated with it and make them feel like their own city event.

Insight & Approach

So when we came up with this idea we were hoping a better crowd as  compared to what we saw last year. But the astonishing thing was we saw such  a good response during the campaigns and later on in the main event that we  were really happy. And the best thing was more and more women preferred to  take part in the event by wearing sarees, kurta pyjamas etc. So now we finally  understand only a women/girl can approach other women & let them feel  good enough to share their concern with them, so we did make the right  decision by taking the help of local women support groups beforehand.

So after the success in 2 cities we informed the higher stakeholders about our  approach towards the situation and how we were successful in making the  right decisions by making the women more comfortable towards the event.  Thus we got a go ahead to carry the same approach in all other tier 2&3 cities  the same way.

So when we came to know how effective the tool is in tackling real life  situations, we tried it in other events also rather than depending on the  existing data with no proper base to it.

So such tools have made me motivated to take a design thinking approach to  my upcoming Entrepreneurship.

