TO BUY Doubling the Number of Families with a Safety Net

TO BUY

Doubling the Number of Families with a Safety Net

• In 1998, there was a breakthough.

• They were missing until 2008, when a campy commercial for the Snuggie.

• The number of sleeved blanket users worldwide is estimated at twenty million and rising every day.

Snuggie!

You can Sell Anything

You can Sell Anything

｢ There's no such thing as a bad product, only a bad salesman. ｣

• Quality and popularity can diverge. Just because something is good for you doesn't mean people will buy it and just because people buy something doesn't mean it's good for you.

You can Sell Anything• We often don't think we need to sell developmen

t solutions at all, but rather expect them to be adopted on their merits alone.

• If we want to help the poor by offering programs and services, two things have to happen:First, we need to make programs and services that work; second the poor have to choose to sign up for them.

• The more we learn about what works, the more we need to get the marketing right-because letting a proven-effective programs fail to due to lack of interest is a waste.

The Last-Mile Problem

The Last-Mile Problem• It is around, and people know they exist. Thi

s is both an advantage and a desadvantage.

• Combined with fluid intake, it effectigely neutralizes the threat of mortality from the disease. The salts cost a couple of pennies at most.

• Nealy two million people, mostly children, die every year from diarrhea. Either they don't know about the salts, or they don't want them. Either way, it means we are failing.



The Last-Mile Problemby Sendhil Mullainathan

Faced with a stubborn challenge, we employ brilliant minds and vast resouces to design a solution. We combine science, engineering,creativity, and careful testing, and often we succeed in solving the technical problem-thus completing 999 miles of a thousand-mile journey. Then, inexplicably, we pack it in. Instead of taking the same rigorous approach to adoption, we just put the solution out there and expect it to speak for itself.

How Much Is a Photo of a Pretty Woman Worth?


• Part of the problem is that economists aren't trained to think about the last mile. Take the example of credit: How does a person decide whether to borrow money? In undergraduate and graduate economics courses, studend learn models of borrowing that consider the interest rate, the person's investment opportunities, and the rate at which he values current versus future consumption.


• Should the flyer show a picture of a pretty woman, and if so, what kind of pretty woman?

• Would proposing uses for the loans or presenting more example loans entice customers?

↓• Adding a picture of an attractive woman to the flyer had the same eff

ect on men as lowering the loan's interest rete by 40 persent!• Showing one example loan instead of four attracted as many additio

nal applicants as dropping the interest rate by about a third.

⇒The results that did stand out in South Africa pointed clearly toward behavioral economics.

Too many Choices

Too many Choices• Recent behavioral research has shown traditional economic's ,pre-choic

es-are-always-better rule to be far from universal. Sometimes options can paralyze. When they are too numerrous or too hard to compare, we orten just procrastinate: "This is a lot to think about right now; I'll get to it tomorrow."

• ｢choice overload｣



• Taken together, those two tweaks ー making in-home sales visit and getting a foot in the door with an introduction from a trusted organization ー fully doubled the chances that a person would sign up. That's twice as many families who have a safety net; twice as many who don't need to worry about going hungry when the rains are bad.

The Importance of Selling

The Importance of Selling

① Finding the thing that work to fight poverty

② Making those things enticing

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TO BUY Doubling the Number of Families with a Safety Net