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Abstract
In recent years, marketing education has broadened to poor people in developing and emerging countries. In this article, the authors use four empirical studies that apply well-established training design procedures to design a marketing training program for Ethiopian pastoralists. Because pastoralists operate in extremely remote, traditional, and sparsely populated regions of developing and emerging markets, the training complements trainings for the poor applied in urban areas of these countries. As such, the article provides implications for training program designers on how they can adapt the training program procedures to other contexts, thereby making marketing ideas accessible to a large and important new target group for marketing education.
In line with a broader movement to teach business and entrepreneurial skills in developing and emerging (D&E) economies (cf. McKenzie & Woodruff, 2014), marketing education has broadened to new target groups in D&E countries (cf. Rosa, 2012). There is a huge potential demand for such training because millions of low-literate individuals are trying to generate an income from marketplaces each day without knowledge that is vital to managing and influencing the ever-changing, increasingly complex and confusing marketplace exchanges (Adkins & Ozanne, 2005a; Viswanathan, Gajendiran, & Venkatesan, 2008). For these people, running their own business is not only a way to survive but is also a potential way out of poverty (Karnani, 2007). To that end, Bloom, Eifert, Mahajan, McKenzie, & Roberts (2013) find that a knowledge gap hinders entrepreneurs in D&E countries from acquiring the management skills needed for business survival and growth. Such a knowledge gap logically has negative consequences for employment, productivity, and economic growth.
Because education can remove this barrier, training in different kinds of management practices becomes increasingly important in D&E countries (McKenzie & Woodruff, 2014). The International Labour Organization (ILO, 2014), for example, runs a program that has already trained 6 million participants during the past 15 years. The ILO and others include marketing with other business competences in one training. Although there are some trainings that specifically focus on marketing, in particular the Marketplace literacy program in urban Chennai, India (Viswanathan, Sridharan, Gau, & Ritchie, 2009), studies on designing marketing training programs are still scarce. Designing such training is, however, a complex task because while “the next four billion” people in D&E countries living at or near subsistence levels have some common characteristics (see Ingenbleek, 2014; Rosa, 2012, for reviews) they are also highly heterogeneous (Burgess & Steenkamp, 2006). The ways in which people cope with the scarcity of resources may vary strongly among localities, such as urban, peri-urban, rural, and remote areas. The training needs, the learning objectives, and concepts logically will vary between contexts that can be extremely different from each other.
In this article, we design a marketing training program for pastoralists in East Africa using stepwise training design procedures (e.g., Kirkpatrick, 1975). As such procedures are not context-dependent, they can be used to design trainings in a wide range of contexts including that of pastoralists. Pastoralists are people with a mobile lifestyle. The nearly 200 million pastoralists worldwide (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2009) move with their herds of cattle, camels, goats, and/or sheep to make efficient and sustainable use of common grazing lands. The context of pastoralists is particularly suitable for this purpose because they are found in extremely remote, sparsely populated, traditional, and dry rural areas. As such, this context forms a contrast with the marketplace literacy training developed for the urban and densely populated context of Chennai (Viswanathan et al., 2009). The new training therefore shapes a range of potential applications between the two extremes. Once the program has a formally designed basis, others can more easily adapt it to the specific subsistence conditions for which they intend to design a training.
In the remainder of this article, we first give a brief overview of marketing trainings for the poor, followed by a discussion of design techniques for marketing trainings. Based on these techniques, we discuss the methods and results of four empirical studies through which the training is step-by-step designed. We finish the article with a general discussion and concrete implications for the trainers or course designers who aim to take the training to new horizons.
Marketing Trainings for the Poor
Business training receives a growing interest in D&E countries to empower the low-income, low-literate individuals in D&E countries to better understand the market environment, create their own opportunities and gain control over their roles in marketplace exchanges (e.g., de Mel, McKenzie, & Woodruff, 2014; Dunford & Watson, 2008; Mano, Iddrisu, Yoshino, & Sonobe, 2012; Viswanathan et al., 2009). The trainings reflect a growing interest of business researchers in the impoverished parts of D&E countries. From a business strategy perspective, Prahalad (2005) approached low-income people as consumers with untapped purchasing power and suggested that the expansion of multinational companies can achieve profitability while alleviating poverty by providing products and services to these consumers at affordable prices. Viswanathan et al. (2009) took a different approach by defining the poor both as consumers to whom to sell and micro-entrepreneurs from whom to buy and focused on the importance of training aimed at empowering the poor.
Table 1 presents an overview of existing business and management trainings for entrepreneurs in D&E countries. The training programs share a set of common topics, including financial literacy (e.g., record-keeping, financial planning, as well as separating household and business finance), costing and pricing, inventory management, and the steps needed to take a product to market (McKenzie & Woodruff, 2014). Several of the studies report that business and entrepreneurship programs support entrepreneurs in improving their business knowledge (Giné & Mansuri, 2014), applying business practices (de Mel et al., 2014), and improving their business performance (Mano et al., 2012).
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Table 1. Overview of Studies of Business and Entrepreneurship Trainings in Developing and Emerging Countries.
While the business training programs and the topics covered are important to acquire or improve business knowledge and performance, they primarily focus on general business topics (McKenzie & Woodruff, 2014). As can be seen from Table 1, column 3, the majority of the business training programs are also offered to entrepreneurs in urban areas who more likely have access to education and educated people, formal businesses, and media than people in rural areas (World Bank & IMF, 2013). Despite the general business focus of the programs, marketing’s fundamental understanding that the customer should come first, seems weakly incorporated. One exception is the marketplace literacy program designed by Viswanathan et al. (2009) for the urban context of Chennai, India. Marketplace literacy refers, in that respect, to the knowledge and ability to accomplish marketing tasks to get one’s needs met (Adkins & Ozanne, 2005b’ Viswanathan et al., 2009). While the trainers of the program make their methods and materials kindly available to others, a more systematic study on training design may further strengthen the quality of marketing trainings as either stand-alone programs or as part of broader business trainings in D&E countries.
Designing Training Programs
A training is any planned activity intended to convey new, to modify, and/or to expand knowledge, skills and attitudes of learners or maintain levels of competence to respond to new developments and changing circumstances, as well as enhance productivity (Arthur, Bennett, Edens, & Bell, 2003; Goldstein, 1993). Schlee and Harich (2010) state that marketing training can be designed to equip learners with knowledge and skills to serve different purposes and levels, including (but not necessarily restricted to) entry-, lower-, middle-, and upper-level jobs.
For a training program to become effective, the training literature suggests to put substantial thought and effort in planning and design (e.g., Kirkpatrick, 1975; Kraiger, McLinden, & Casper, 2004). Training programs become effective in delivering new insights and knowledge if they are designed to account for prior knowledge and practice of learners (Angelo, 1993; Halpern & Hakel, 2003). This is because such trainings guide the learners to acquire new knowledge by connecting to what the learners know and do at the start of the training, as well as help learners to store the new knowledge in long-term memory to easily retrieve it when they need it (Angelo, 1993; Tannenbaum & Yukl, 1992). Furthermore, learners acquire and store knowledge better if training programs are designed to be learner centered and engaging by incorporating visual, demonstrational, and learning-by-doing exercises (Clarke, Flaherty, & Yankey, 2006; Grossman, Salas, Pavlas, Games, & Rosen, 2013; Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 2014). Following guiding steps provides in that respect a structure to decide on what to incorporate, who should be trained, and what methods to use to training targeted participants (Salas & Cannon-Bowers, 2001).
Kirkpatrick’s (1975) 10-step program is still one of the most popular ways to systematically design an effective training program (Tamkin, Yarnall, & Kerrin, 2002). The steps include (1) assessing the training needs, (2) defining the learning objectives, (3) outlining the subject contents, (4) selecting participants, (5) determining the training schedule, (6) selecting appropriate facilities, (7) selecting appropriate trainer(s), (8) selecting and preparing audiovisual aids, (9) coordinating the program, and (10) evaluating the program. As these steps are not dependent on a particular context, they should also help design training programs for the poor, including our study context.
For our purpose to design a marketing training program for Ethiopian pastoralists, we combine some of these steps in one study (see Figure 1). First, we conducted a qualitative study to assess the marketing training needs of pastoralists. Next, we formulate initial learning objectives on the basis of fundamental marketing concepts to convey the knowledge that pastoralists need to align their products to market requirements. Then, we conducted a study to concretize and contextualize the learning objectives, ensuring that they connect with the existing knowledge and interpretation schemes of pastoralists. Subsequently, we conducted a study to identify and validate suitable pedagogical methods to convey the learning objectives. Finally, participants’ selection, recruiting trainer, training schedule, and coordination were accomplished when the complete training protocol was tested. We discuss these steps in the following sections.
Figure 1. Explicating the theoretical foundation and contextualization of marketing training. Based on Kirkpatrick (1975).
Assessing the Marketing Training Needs of Pastoralists
Method
To understand the training needs of pastoralists, we conducted a needs assessment study in three pastoral regions in Ethiopia, namely Afar, Borana, and Somali. Because pastoralists live to a large extent isolated from the market, they are often unable to articulate their own learning needs. We therefore derive the learning needs from a bottom-up, contextual understanding that we created from the existing literature and by revisiting qualitative data that we collected during previous studies. In 2009, we visited three different pastoral regions in Ethiopia where we conducted interviews with 64 pastoralists, 54 other chain actors (like traders, brokers, and slaughter houses), as well 13 experts. We also conducted 14 focus groups with 5 to 8 pastoralists and we observed marketplaces and companies in the livestock chain. This round of data focused on the market integration of pastoralists in general. Another round of data collection in 2013 focused more specifically on the market knowledge of pastoralists and included interviews with 50 pastoralists and three focus group discussions of six to eight participants each. We also did 18 interviews with chain parties and visited 10 experts.
Results
The training needs of pastoralists are rooted in the fact that their context is deprived of productive resources such as infrastructure and education relevant to broadening the thinking horizon and to embrace new developments. Pastoralists operate in extremely remote areas that isolate them from the other value chain actors. Unlike the densely populated urban contexts where well-networked people continuously exchange information (Fafchamps, 2001), pastoralists are distant from one another, which makes retrieving information from the network more difficult (Ingenbleek, Tessema, & van Trijp, 2013). Because they occupy marginal agriculture lands, raising livestock using a mobile lifestyle is essentially the only sustainable business opportunity (Nori, Kenyanjui, Yusuf, & Mohammed, 2006). To survive in the harsh environment, pastoralists have developed strong customary rules that shape community members’ relationships, information exchange, and use of common resources (World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism [WISP], 2007). Although the pastoralists have some relationships with local and national governmental bodies, they largely administer themselves by drawing on their cultural values, norms and traditions (WISP, 2007). To ensure the continuity of traditions, clan leaders inspect members’ conformity to norms, and they enforce these by social pressure and sanctions.
We observed that pastoralists are usually in the grazing fields with their herds, where they fully devote themselves to reproducing their livestock to increase their herd size. They have limited exposure to and interaction with the external environment, the “nonpastoral world” as pastoralists call it. As such, they have built their own traditional knowledge that helps them build their herds. Pastoralists increase the size of their herds because it gives them a higher social status and because the animals provide milk, which is a key component of their diets. The pastoralists thus primarily raise livestock to fulfill their own needs and do not consider buyers’ preferences in their livestock production, implying that customer consideration is almost absent from their production-oriented model. When pastoralists are in need of cash to purchase food items, and cloths or to pay for education for their children, they trek their animals from the grazing fields over long distances to sell them on regular market days in fixed marketplaces.
While pastoralists know these marketplaces and the practices that they observe there, they rarely consider other mechanisms (e.g., direct contacts and phone calls with traders) to trade their livestock. One pastoralist, for example, replied to our question “Where and how do you sell your animals when you do?” “I always sell my animals in Dubuluq (a physical place in Borana region), the marketplace built and arranged for us by the government. Other marketplaces are very far from our village.” The choice of the animals that they offer for sale is mostly based on the cash that they need to cover their estimated expenditure. It is not based on assessment of buyers’ preferences, livestock supply from others, or other market conditions that influence livestock prices. Pastoralists are not aware that traders’ decisions to buy or reject animals also depends on the livestock production and supply by others (e.g., farmers and commercial producers). Ninety-two percent of those involved in this study replied to our question “Do you consider highland farmers as your competitors?” as “No, they have their own life and fate, and we have our own life and fate.” Their livestock selling choice and decision, thus, is rarely supported by knowledge from the external sources about the market phenomena that could help them to take advantage of favorable market conditions or avoid the unfavorable ones.
In the marketplaces, the pastoralists are confronted with better informed and educated buyers who may take advantage of their superior understanding on the functioning of the market, the market phenomena, and price. In the marketplaces that we visited, we observed that pastoralists rarely try to directly communicate with livestock buyers. They rather contact brokers from their own clan to find buyers for whatever animal they supply and negotiate for price on their behalf, because they fear that well-informed livestock traders can take advantage of them with their superior knowledge and negotiation abilities. One pastoralist noted “traders and brokers are shrewd in bargaining and they try to make things fuzzy for us so that we accept their description of the quality of our animals and the price they offer.” Pastoralists communicate with brokers from their own clan on the basis of trust and honesty. They have inherited these values from many generations before them as strong customary rules and social obligations for their collective well-being. Brokers and traders, however, sometimes exploit the situation to their own advantage and use communication signs, psychological games, and tricks to deceive pastoralists. Because pastoralists rarely understand the communication signs and tricks, or are less empowered to challenge the brokers, they have little influence on the marketplace dealings. We showed a sign to a pastoralist that traders frequently use to communicate with brokers on how much price to offer to the pastoralists, he said “I don’t know what it means.”
As pastoralists’ interaction with the market occurs through brokers and is limited to the fixed marketplaces, they have less opportunity to meet and know the different livestock buyers who operate at different stages of the livestock value chain. They thus lack the bigger picture of the livestock value chain. Pastoralists therefore need a marketing training that acquaints them with the basic knowledge of what a market is, how it functions, and why they should consider the needs of livestock buyers as a basis for breeding and raising livestock. A better understanding of how competition from other livestock suppliers and unethical behaviors of buyers affect their negotiation position, and ultimately the price, would also help to be more successful on the market. Responsiveness to such knowledge would in turn help the pastoralists to improve their livelihood performance and decrease their poverty.
Explicating Theoretically Underpinned Learning Objectives
While the training needs assessment helps understand the knowledge gaps of pastoralists, marketing theory may help select the content for the training. Consistent with recent ideas from the literature on marketing’s contribution to development (Ingenbleek, 2014), we formulate learning objectives that are both contextually meaningful and theoretically underpinned by moving from the “bottom up” and from the “top down.” The top-down process starts in that respect from generally applicable marketing principles that can later be contextualized. To come to learning objectives at the level of generally applicable principles, we draw on customer value theory (Woodruff, 1997). This perspective suggests that if businesses integrate resources and develop value propositions with the aim to satisfy customers, they will be rewarded with among others higher sales, willingness to pay, and customer loyalty (e.g., Kotler & Armstrong, 2012; Woodruff, 1997). As such, it may help lift pastoralists out of poverty.
Educational psychology literature asserts that teaching basic concepts to students enables them to develop the mental abilities, relevant to understanding the world around them, solving problems, logical reasoning, and making informed-choices (e.g., Bostrom & Sandberg, 2009; Rittle-Johnson, Siegler, & Alibali, 2001; UNESCO, 2006). Comparable to educational psychology, the marketing education literature asserts that the aim of marketing education is to build a knowledge base and to equip learners with critical thinking, ability to integrate abstract concepts with concrete phenomena, and logical reasoning to make critical decisions and accomplish their tasks (e.g., Petkus, 2007; Schibrowsky, Pltier, & Boyt, 2002). To build the knowledge base, “students must obviously understand the basic marketing concepts” (Henke, 1985, pp. 59).
These concepts are market, market exchange, market dynamics, customer-centric business, competition, marketing instruments, and value chain (Burnett, 2008; Kotler & Keller, 2012). We further add business ethics, which is essential for balancing profit making and satisfying customer needs (de George, 2011). Understanding market as a heterogeneous interacting set of parties involved in the process of facilitating market exchanges (Burnett, 2008; Kotler & Keller, 2012), for example, can make pastoralists think about their transactions in a more systematic way, covering the exchanges in physical market places and the exchanges they make along their way to the marketplaces. Understanding market dynamics will help entrepreneurs to scrutinize the changes in customer preferences, supply of products, and price changes, thus, enabling them to survive unfavorable market conditions and seize opportunities. A learning objective on customer-centric business will help pastoralists to organize their livestock production with a focus on customers and undertake value-creating and value-delivering activities to outperform the competition. In the embedded context of D&E marketplaces in which the cultural norm is to maintain the status quo that ensures everyone’s survival, the notion of competition may easily be overlooked though it exists in some form (Ingenbleek et al., 2013). In the livestock market, for example, competition exists, in that highland farmers, fattening operators, commercial cooperatives, and pastoralists supply similar products.
Understanding the marketing instruments is important for pastoralists and other entrepreneurs to make decisions on what product (attributes) to offer to customers, how to communicate, and how to make the product easily accessible as well as affordable to customers (Kotler & Keller, 2012). Understanding value chain as a series of actors—from input suppliers to producers and processors to intermediaries and final consumers—can help the pastoralists to see the bigger picture of their transactions and to cooperate and work in coordination with subsequent chain members (Vitale, Giglierano, & Pfoertsch, 2011). A learning objective on business ethics will make pastoralists (who depend on ethical values of trust and honesty) aware that transacting parties from the modern market may not be as ethical as the pastoralists are. It acquaints the pastoralists with the understanding of their rights and responsibilities as sellers to influence marketplace exchanges, and to understand and respond to unethical behaviors (psychological games and tricks from brokers and traders). The learning objective can also help pastoralists to identify and create linkage with ethical livestock traders who live up to their promises.
Contextualizing the Learning Objectives
Learners easily capture new insights if learning objectives are concretely and meaningfully connected to what they already know and do (Angelo, 1993; Halpern & Hakel, 2003). Raising livestock has been the prime activity of pastoralists for thousands of years. They therefore give meaning to their life and interpret any matter that comes to them from the outside world by linking to their livestock. Because this way of thinking is fundamentally different from that of marketing educators, we conducted this study to check whether and how our learning objectives (Table 2) can be connected to the existing frames of interpretation of pastoralists.
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Table 2. Explicating Theoretically Underpinned Learning Objectives.
Method
We discussed the learning objectives with 50 pastoralists (in individual interviews) in Afar, Somali, and Borana pastoral regions in 2013. In addition to these interviews, we discussed the learning objectives with three focus groups that consisted of six to seven pastoralists. With the help of development agents in each region, we recruited pastoralists who are willing to participate and capable of reflecting and providing feedback on the learning objectives. We used pictures and posters of, among others, money, livestock buyers, and mobile phones for communication and information sharing with brokers, traders, and other livestock suppliers, to explain the concepts. Experienced translators who all have a pastoral background and tertiary education levels facilitated the discussions with the pastoralists. Interviews lasted 40 minutes to 1 hour, while group discussions lasted between 1 and 2 hours.
Results
The interviews and discussions helped further concretize and contextualize the concepts and learning objectives to the livestock economy (Table 3, left column). In all three regions, we observed that the participants became submissive and repeatedly waited for further explanations. They tried to avoid discussion on some concepts, signaling that they had nothing to say or reflect on the concepts. Because pastoralists do not recognize livestock production as business, our respondents were reluctant to discuss on customer-centered livestock raising business. Initially, they argued that they are not business people and that business has no connection to what they do. One respondent, for example, explained “this is not our issue, we are pastoralists raising livestock; you should discuss it with those who run hotels in Yabello (name of a nearby town).”
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Table 3. Contextualizing the Learning Objectives and Pilot-Testing the Complete Training Program.
In discussing the market concept, they related it to their common knowledge of a fixed physical marketplace they usually visit on regular market days, as mentioned in the study for needs assessment. Livestock traders and exporters, however, understand livestock market as a mechanism (e.g., marketplaces, directly contacting potential livestock sellers or linkages through NGOs and government offices) that facilitates trading livestock. As pastoralists also faced difficulties in quickly capturing other concepts, we simplified the concepts by relating them more to livestock raising and selling and to the benefits of customer-centered livestock production. Concretizing the concepts into specific livestock production and marketing practices also facilitated subsequent interviews and discussions because it minimized confusion, communication gaps, and misunderstanding between us and the participants.
Pastoralists strive to achieve collective well-being and sustainable use of physical natural resources. As such, as stated in the section on training needs assessment, they lack a sense of competition. The discussion on competition helped to understand how pastoralists can capture the concept. We explained competition as information sharing about the livestock market and learning from others by discussing and observing what they do to tailor their products to the requirements of livestock buyers. We also found that pastoralists understand the meaning of competition when they become aware that there are other suppliers of livestock, including highland farmers, commercial cooperatives, and fattening operators.
Pastoralists also feared that customer-centered livestock production can lead to overexploitation of pasture and water and, thus, increase profits at the expense of the ecological sustainability of the commonly shared grazing lands. An interpretation that would suggest that customer-oriented pastoralists can freely overexploit natural resources if buyers ask them to violate pastoralists’ strong customary rule of protecting common resources for their collective well-being. The feedback from the participants helped us to carefully interpret the learning objective as creating a long-term relationship with customers to consistently meet the needs of the customers. We emphasized that a long-term commitment to satisfy the needs of customers cannot be achieved without a long-term commitment to protecting natural resources (because to satisfy customers in the future with high-quality livestock the grazing lands should still be in a good condition).
Identification and Validation of Pedagogical Methods
Method
In this study, we aim to identify and validate suitable pedagogical methods that can effectively convey the concretized and contextualized learning objectives. We reviewed education and marketplace literacy literature to design pedagogically suitable training methods that enable to convey abstract concepts to low-literate people (e.g., Knowles et al., 2014; UNESCO, 2006; Viswanathan et al., 2008). Methods that seem suitable for teaching low-literate people were discussed with five pedagogy experts working in universities and community teaching centers in Ethiopia. The discussion with the experts focused on whether low-literate pastoralists can learn abstract concepts, and the experts were questioned on whether the identified teaching methods are pedagogically effective to enable the low-literate pastoralists to capture and integrate new knowledge with their existing practice. After incorporating comments from the pedagogy experts, we pretested the methods with the pastoralists from September to October 2014.
Pretesting the teaching methods was conducted in the Borana region. Compared with other pastoral regions in Ethiopia, the Borana region is relatively remote and is characterized by relatively low diversification (i.e., livestock raising is the predominant business). To recruit and interview the pastoralists, we worked with the Borana Zone Trade and Market Development (BTMD) office, which facilitates pastoral livelihood improvement and market integration packages. Two experienced employees of BTMD, who completed tertiary education and have a pastoral background, were employed to help us recruit the pastoralists and pretest the teaching methods. Twelve pastoralists were first invited in a training session to observe their comfort with and feelings toward the training methods. In this session, the trainer followed more of a one-way (lecture-type) form of communication. This first training session was followed by three others, each consisting of six to eight participants performing two-way (interactive) communication.
Results
The findings from our desk research suggest that low-literate people like pastoralists can learn concepts and new knowledge if they are presented through methods that are adapted to the participants’ conditions and literacy constraints (Cohen, 2008; Rogers & Horrocks, 2010). We found from the literature that low-literate learners remember most from discussions and learn-by-doing exercises, and from using visuals, like pictures, flow diagrams, charts, and videos (Clarke et al., 2006; Grossman et al., 2013; Knowles et al., 2014). Also, the pedagogy experts that we consulted noted that discussions with pastoralists need to take the form of socially structured oral dialogues, metaphors, and storytelling because pastoralists use similar means to transfer knowledge over generations. The methods also need to create close social relationships, because in the pastoralist culture such trust-based relations are seen as important when sharing information. Pastoralists transfer information through proverbs, stories, and oral and verbal expressions. Accordingly, we designed pictorial presentations, guided oral and group discussions and presentations, role-model storytelling, and video presentations to convey the learning objectives, promote active participation, and effectively engage the participants (Table 3, second column). Participants were provided with a poster displaying a livestock value chain, and pictures were created to prioritize livestock production and marketing business components. In group exercises, the participants discussed the pictures and presented what they agreed upon (Table 3, cell of row 4, column 2).
During the first pretest with 12 participants, we observed participants facing difficulties to actively follow the explanations from the trainer. For example, after the trainer gave the lecture, he asked the participants “Do you understand what I mean?” The participants replied “No, you said many things on your own.” As such, an oral one-way explanation of concepts and pictures from the trainer (a classroom lecture-type discussion) is less likely to be effective at conveying the learning outcomes. Thus, in the other sessions, we followed a two-way interactive and group discussion that helped us engage the participants and enable them to understand the concepts (e.g., Table 3, cell of row 1, column 2). Also, explaining the subject matter using local sayings and story-telling by a role-model who belongs to the participants enabled them to remain focused (Table 3, cell of row 7, column 2). Some methods also come with practical challenges. To explain the concept of customer-centered business activities, we decided to show a video that demonstrates the production and marketing activities of a customer-oriented pastoralist (Table 3, cell of row 7, column 2). This was challenging, as electricity is unavailable in the area. We, therefore, used solar energy and brought a generator in case the power from the solar system was too weak.
Pilot Testing of the Complete Training Program
The methods were incorporated in a complete training protocol that could subsequently be tested. The fourth study was conducted to test this complete protocol. It was aimed at ensuring the feasibility and likely success of the complete training protocol and obtain qualitative responses during the training days and during exit interviews or discussions. Finally, the study aimed to identify any unforeseen and discomforting factors that would potentially deter active participation and engagement in longer hours and consecutive training days.
Method
To test the complete training program and obtain qualitative results that promise a further quantitative experimental study, we continued our cooperation with the BTMD office and a test in a pastoral village in Borana. We selected the village with pastoralists who have sufficient level of market exposure to make the training program meaningful. With the help of two development agents in the village, 12 pastoralists who can benefit from their participation were recruited and trained for three consecutive days in March 2015. We consulted members of two development organizations (SOS Sahel and the FAO) that have experience in training pastoralists on conflict-handling and natural resource management for the feedback on the training schedule. Following their recommendations, we trained participants for 5 hours each day. Because pastoralists have to make sure that herds are assigned to grazing areas (early morning) and that they are all back safely to settlements at sundown, each training day was scheduled between 10:00 am and 04:00 pm. We also exempted participants from 12:30 pm to 01:30 pm for lunch, to share information and to chew khat (a traditional stimulant). Major market days were avoided to allow the participants to visit the marketplaces. For pastoralists, visiting marketplaces is not only a matter of selling or buying things, it is also a social gathering to share and discuss sociopolitical issues like meeting relatives, arbitraging disputes, and arranging marriages. For pictures taken during the training, see Figure 2.
A trainer who works at BTMD was recruited to train the participants. He has more than 20 years of working experience with pastoralists in different positions, including as a trainer. Currently, he is working as the head of BTMD and as a senior expert in market development to facilitate the market integration of pastoralists. He is also working as a part-time technical adviser to the Borana office of SOS Sahel. The trainer had completed tertiary education and has a pastoralist background (shares their culture and language) and, he was, therefore, comfortable in using metaphors, traditional storytelling, and other customs. To internalize the concepts and the overall objective of the study, he was also involved in the studies on training needs assessment, contextualization of learning objectives, and pretesting the teaching methods. The first author assisted the trainer in facilitating and coordinating the program. The trainer thus fully devoted his time on the training. Like Viswanathan et al. (2009), we covered costs incurred during testing the program, expecting our participants to give us their time and attention.
Results
During the training, we gradually observed that the participants started to recognize and internalize the concepts. Initially, the participants refused to recognize that they were conducting business, but the trainer stimulated discussion by explaining what business is. At the end of the discussion, the participants had come to a consensus that raising and marketing livestock is a business and that they are the owners of this business. This further triggered their interest in how they could conduct their business more successfully.
Many of the participants also held the belief that livestock is most important to them, followed by money, because it is their livestock that brings them money from selling. One participant exclaimed “It is our livestock that brings us money from the market; Daldalaas (traders) give us money by taking our livestock in return. Even the daldalaas pay us lower prices for our animals.” Using this opinion as input, the trainer extended the discussed by offering practical examples. A case in point was the question, “Why are your livestock facing frequent rejection in the marketplaces?” After a long discussion, the participants concluded that the traders reject their livestock because they do not meet their quality requirements. Consequently, they agreed on the importance of focusing on the customer and adopted the terms customer-first and quality over quantity to guide the rest of the training discussions.
The methods used in the training helped to properly convey the learning objectives and relax the hierarchical relationship of pastoralists. For example, a poster used to present the livestock supply channel, which charted the path from the pastoralists to the final consumer, helped the pastoralists to see the flow of their livestock and the impact of their production activities in the value chain. After studying the value chain, one participant noted “It is clear from the picture that we have many who can buy our animals at several stages.” They also watched a video that showed the story of a successful pastoralist who changed his life for the better by undertaking customer-focused production and marketing activities (see Figure 2). Ice-breaking games also played a critical role in relaxing the hierarchy among pastoralists by making the participants to interactively participate and speak to each other. One ice-breaking game we used was a paired rotation discussion by dividing participants as sellers and buyers, with the sellers’ group holding pictures of animals (goat, ox, camel, or sheep) to sell to the buyer group. Each buyer met with each seller to negotiate and buy an animal; this allowed participants to talk with each other.
At the end of the training session, exit interviews were held with the participants to learn how they experienced the training. One participant noted, “After watching the video, I realize now why my livestock have been rejected—it is because I do not prepare them for the market. I learned that I should raise my livestock through the eyes of the buyer.” In the exit discussion, we also asked the participants whether it is important to offer such training to pastoralists. An elderly man answered the question using their local saying. He said,
Once there was a blind man who asked his God: “The day has passed unproductive, please give me someone who can make my night bright” So this blind man asked his God to give him someone who can make his future productive. Providing a training like this to pastoralists is answering the critical question that the blind man was asking his God.
The responses obtained during the training session and exit discussion of this study promise that a rigorously designed marketing training program following formal steps can equip participants with insights and knowledge that may help them to improve their living conditions.
Implications for Training Designers in Other Subsistence Contexts
Marketing has a long tradition of developing marketing trainings for people in the advanced markets with knowledge and abilities that help them to perform marketing activities in the rapidly changing global markets. However, the rapidly changing global markets are also affecting the lives of people in more remote areas of D&E countries. Marketing training therefore helps empower these people to survive in and benefit from the markets. This study has designed a training program for the extremely remote, sparsely populated, and highly traditional rural context of pastoralists. The pastoralist context provides an interesting contrast with the densely populated, urban contexts, for which Viswanathan et al. (2009) developed their training. Below we provide concrete advice on how to design training programs to a range of other subsistence contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that lay somewhere in between the two extremes. We present these lessons in Table 4.
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Table 4. Designing a Marketing Training for Entrepreneurs.
The first advice for training designers is to initiate their training design process by assessing the problems and challenges (the knowledge gap) that entrepreneurs in subsistence contexts encounter to run value-creating and profit-making businesses. The training needs can logically differ depending on factors like access to resources, exposure to institutions, and competences they have developed as well as on their traditions and ways of coping with their environment. The ability of the entrepreneurs to sort and communicate their needs is also likely to depend on such factors. Entrepreneurs in dynamic, fast-growing, and rapidly urbanizing areas are for example more merited to broaden their thought horizons and to develop responsive behavior because of their exposure to education, educated people, companies, and media (Dahiya, 2012; UN-HABITAT, 2010). As such, they are more capable to understand and concretely tell what they need in order to improve their job performance. In this situation, a checklist or questionnaire can be used to determine their learning needs. Pastoralists, however, have limited access to education, companies, and media, which logically undermines their ability to understand and diagnose the real problems to effectively function in the market. In such contexts, a check list or simple survey will not reveal the actual training needs of the target group. Rather, a thorough contextual insight derived from a variety of qualitative research methods may generate the insights that are required in the learning needs to formulate learning objectives.
Second, learning objectives can exist at different levels of abstraction. The basic understanding of why businesses exist and why customers are important is more likely present among entrepreneurs in urban areas. Their trainings may therefore focus on more concrete objectives, like specific marketing skills and practices that increase profits. Pastoralists have a limited understanding about why customers are the basic reason for the existence of businesses. The learning objectives therefore require a relatively high abstraction level. Depending on the context of their training, training designers can vary the required level of abstraction.
More specifically, the learning objectives on business ethics differ between the dynamic, urban, and traditional, rural areas. In urban places the aim is more likely to teach entrepreneurs to be ethical and not to cheat on others, but to build strong customer relationships. In traditional remote settings, it is however more important to make participants aware that not all market players have the same strong values as they have. So it is important to make them aware how they may be cheated and what they can do to protect themselves from such practices.
Third, the importance of contextualizing and concretizing the concepts and learning objectives is logically more important if they are formulated at higher levels of abstraction. Training designers that develop trainings for other rural contexts will therefore need to specify the objectives for the business activities that apply to their context, often depending on the natural environment. Urban entrepreneurs have a much larger diversity of businesses that they potentially can start. While rural contexts are often constraint to one or a few cash-generating activities, the diversified urban economy offers many different opportunities.
Fourth, contextual differences also have an impact on the types of teaching methods that training designers can use. The wide range of products and services that are present in the urban context offers trainers a large diversity of examples that they can use in their training. In the rural context instead, all examples should pertain directly to the business activities undertaken by the participants. Other examples may not be understood. Rural areas are also more likely to have practical constraints in the application of different teaching methods. While urban settings may be equipped with training rooms equipped with basic facilities to show pictures, posters, and videos, in the rural context all basic facilities may be absent, even the training rooms themselves. This logically requires more creativity in terms of developing feasible learning methods as well as a greater burden to the trainers and organizers who should bring in more equipment themselves. Pretesting helps in contextually validating the methods and in drawing the ways in which the target community itself transfers knowledge from one generation to the next.
Fifth, pretesting the training also forces training designers to think about the selection of the respondents. People in urban contexts may have a relatively higher willingness to participate in trainings as it is clear to them how they will benefit from it. They may even search for such trainings and be willing to pay for it. In more remote, rural areas, the potential participants may, however, lack the awareness that the modern market-based economy is knocking on their doors and they may fear that the training interrupts their daily activities. Close collaboration with development agents, determining a convenient time-schedule, and hiring a trainer that shares the background of the participants may help secure participation in this context.
Future Research and Application
The impact assessment of our training is restricted to qualitative responses on the reaction level of traditional Kirkpatrick types of training evaluations (Tamkin et al., 2002). Future research should examine other impact levels, notably whether the training results in learning, behavioral change, and the desired improvement of livelihood performance of pastoralists. While impact assessment of trainings is already a challenging task in advanced economies (e.g., Tamkin et al., 2002), it is even more challenging in remote subsistence contexts. We therefore propose an impact study that uses field-experimental methods commonly used in development research (Duflo, 2006). This means that variables pertaining to knowledge, behavior, and socioeconomic performance should be measured before and after the training intervention and that the experimental design should contain a control group to establish a counterfactual.
Based on the insights of such an impact study, the results of the training can be traded of against the costs. We incurred a total cost of Ethiopian Birr (ETB) 147,754 (approximately US$ 6,732.92) to design and pilot-test the training program. The costs categories include material preparation and translation (ETB 49,124 ≈ US$ 2,238.51), supporting materials (e.g., pictures, posters, and video; ETB 3,420 ≈ US$ 155.85), power (solar equipment/generator rental; ETB 1,500 ≈ US$ 68.35), hiring a professional trainer, and facilitators (development agents and clan/local leader for their service in the coordination process; ETB 37,000 ≈ US$ 1,686), transport (ETB 25,000 ≈ US$ 1,139.21), and catering (31,710 ≈ US$ 1,444.98). In future applications of the training these costs may be covered by stakeholders that benefit from the training, including buyers like slaughterhouses and fatteners who may obtain livestock of a higher quality. Also the national governments may benefit as pastoralists make an important contribution to the international trade balance. Finally, a smooth and peaceful entry of pastoralists into the market economy is of interest to society at large, as pastoralists constitute a large population that crosses borders with politically relatively unstable countries like Somalia and South Sudan.
Conclusion
This study has shown that well-established training design procedures are also useful to design a training program for the remote and traditional context of pastoralists. The study provides new insights on how marketing can be taught to people who have little experience with the market-based economy. We recommend research to conduct studies in other D&E countries to design and to systematically examine their impact. Such insights will help integrate people in remote areas around the world with the market economy in a smooth and peaceful manner.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support from NUFFIC through the Netherlands Initiative for Capacity Development program.
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