In the mid part of the 20th century the Peruvian government instituted a program of education for villagers with the goal of improving their health and giving them longer lives. One of the cornerstones of the program was a campaign to get villagers to boil their drinking water – this part of the program was a failure, apparently reporting a conversion rate of only 6% of households.
The reasons for the failure and the implications that might be drawn from the failure are important lessons for marketers who give serious thought to Target Markets.
Before looking at the reasons for failure, it’s interesting to note that the campaign appeared to have a serious commitment to success:
- The duration of the campaign was two years
- A local health worker was assigned to the village to provide education and training
- The health worker made numerous visits to each family where she engaged in one-on-one discussions
- A doctor was made available to help educate the people of the village
In spite of this investment the conversion rate was extremely low – why?
Reasons For Low Conversion Rate
- Culture norms
- Childhood learning
- Who has influence
- Lack of audience understanding
- The strategy
Culture Norms
At the time of the campaign the widespread custom in the village was that sick people avoid extremes of “hot” and “cold” food and liquid. The act of boiling water was seen as taking the “cold” out of the water. Hence only sick people would drink boiled water, healthy people would not.
With hindsight, we can see that the existing perceptions of the audience might play an important part in thinking about how to conduct this campaign, but at the time no account was taken of audience attitudes.
Childhood Learning
People in the village learnt from childhood to dislike boiled water. Indeed from a taste point of view, most would only tolerate it if some flavoring were added. Boiling water was seen as a way to remove the “cold” quality.
Once again, with hindsight, we can observe that the campaign did not take into account this predisposition.
Influence
The health worker targeted individual families and would visit each family to explain the benefits of boiled water and other techniques for improving the quality of people’s lives. Many of the villagers saw the health worker as someone who was trying to add even more work to their already busy lives. Hence the message fell on “deaf ears” for many of the villagers.
Influence – the exception case
One of the housewives who did convert to boiling water did not have the traditional background of the other villagers. This woman had only lived in the village for about a year and was seen as an outsider. Here we see two interesting facets of “communication for change.”
The woman in question had come from the mountains and was concerned about the increased likelihood of illness on the plains where the village in question was located. Thus her predisposition was toward finding ways to avoid ill health.
In addition, she was seen as an outsider in the village and was not subject to the same peer pressure that perpetuated the cultural norms.
The receptivity of this woman’s attitude is another important lesson for people thinking about target markets.
Influence – Who should they speak to?
When you stand back from the whole situation you can see that going directly to villagers who had existing attitudes about boiled water was unlikely to succeed. So this raises the question of who should the health worker have approached? Clearly, she needed to find people who had influence over the rest of the village. This would most likely be the village leaders.
Lack Of Audience Understanding
The health worker was assisted by a doctor in trying to educate the people of the village. They explained about the microbes in the water and how the boiling process killed them. For the most part the villagers didn’t comprehend this for a very simple reason. We all know that people drown in water, so how could microbes survive? – The message didn’t make any sense to them.
The Strategy
With hindsight, we can see that a very different approach would be needed if the message was to “hit home.” Indeed a whole different strategy might have produced a very different result. The very obvious flaws in the strategy were:
- Lack of understanding of the audience
- Inappropriate message
- Message delivered to the wrong people
