INCREASING CUSTOMER PATRONAGE

Challenge  I work as an assistant marketing manager for a business development firm situated in one  of the most reputable tertiary institutions in Ghana. Our mandate is to promote innovative  entrepreneurship among the youth. In spite of all efforts aimed at getting them, students  from the various colleges within the university barely recognize nor patronize our services.  This possess a great challenge to the marketing department and ultimately to the  organization as a whole, mainly because the student group forms the major component of  our target market.

Selection  After adopting the design-thinking model as an approach to solving the problem, I lead a  team to investigate and suggest sustainable solutions to the problem. We were able to  develop a prototype aimed at solving the problem and readied it for a learning launch. The  learning launch is a low cost solution that was rolled out to ascertain what works and what  needs to be “re-worked”.

Application  The realization we made from establishing the current realities and what a solution should  look like lead us to develop several solution concepts. Some of the concepts developed  were benched and others channeled into developing a prototype. For the learning launch,  we focused on targeting a small student group and adopted a short timeline. We realized  from the earlier stages of the process that, students placed great value on the  recommendations of their lecturers, and that the curriculum did not factor in  entrepreneurship training which made the students not appreciate the need for it. We also  noticed that the colleges had mentorship programme that engaged the teaching staff to  serve as mentors to the students.

We therefore organized an info session for the teaching staff of a particular department  with a student population of approximately eight hundred (800), and the leadership of the  student association within the department.

During the info session, we emphasized the need to promote youth entrepreneurship and  the need for market research in business (which forms part of the main activities of my  organization). We also show them records of the start-ups and business we have been able  to scale up, the packages we have installed for students as well as how they may also  benefit from it. We again established a login protocol to using our facility that helped us  gather information on how the students got to know our facility and what inspired them to  requite our services.

This approach was to make use of the existing social structures within the department to  inspire students to recognize the value we provide and employ our services.

Insights

By applying the learning launch, we realized an increase in patronage of our services by  students from the department in question however, the students would visit our facility for  a short lived periods and will refuse to come back after three to four visits. We found out  that this was because of the cost structure for our service. Students could barely pay for  the cost of recruiting our service even though they were very contempt with what we had  to offer.

Approach  We acknowledge the efficacy of the learning launch as a tool to improve upon the solution  the organization’s challenge. Future learning launches will take into consideration the  insight gained from the first learning launch that we organized, including the factors that  gave us the desired outcome and those that did not yield the best results. Again, it will  include cost structures that better suit the students.

