Demand Catalyst

The Demand Catalyst focuses on understanding consumers and driving demand.

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Introduction
Surfacing User Insights
Building User Centricity
Learning From Others
What Are We Missing?

The User Insights Lab

To massively scale demand and sustained use of clean cooking, enterprises, governments and clean cooking programs must rapidly innovate to deploy solutions that effectively solve problems for end users. Through CCA’s Clean Cooking Systems Strategy process, stakeholders identified the need for a User Insights Lab (UIL) to generate and integrate insights on users into clean cooking business models, product innovation, and policy making.

The UIL’s North Star: Tens of millions of new households accessing and using clean cooking solutions.
The UIL’s Approach: Combining human centered design, behavioral science, and action-based research to develop new data, tools, and capabilities to support a transformational shift to user-centered innovation in the clean cooking sector.
Have an idea? What user-related challenges should the UIL focus on? Do you have an idea or resource the UIL should know about? Please email us at userinsights@cleancooking.org.

How the UIL is Surfacing User Insights

The UIL is conducting action-research projects to generate user insights that can drive adoption and sustained use of clean cooking, including:

Working with enterprises to design and deploy clean cooking solutions that serve the needs of tens of thousands of Haitian street vendors

Description: Street vendors are an important segment of current and potential users of clean cooking solutions, with a vested interest in improving the cooking experience. Working with Constellation Design Strategy, the project’s first phase involved interviews and journey mapping to explore the constraints that limit the adoption of clean cooking by street food vendors. The project’s second phase engages street vendors in a participatory innovation process to design solutions to address these constraints. The UIL will then test and refine these solutions to de-risk them, and then identify partners to launch market priority solutions.
Stay Tuned: An interactive systems journey map that shows the complexity of street vendors’ decision-making processes is coming soon. Innovations co-designed with street vendors are expected in late 2023, after which CCA will work with manufacturers to bring priority solutions to the market.

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Helping enterprises better understand their customers’ experiences and drive sustained use

Description: To better understand customer’s experiences with their clean cooking products, CCA worked with 60 decibels to collect data from 3,264 customers of 12 CCA Venture Catalyst companies in 6 countries. This aggregate report shows where their performance ranks across key customer service metrics, such as challenge resolution rates, ease of use, Net Promoter Score, customer perceptions on value for money, cooking experiences, fuel transitions, quality of life improvements, safety and health impacts, and changes in fuel spending and cooking time. The UIL aims to further mine this data to surface new insights and support enterprises to implement innovations that improve their customer experience.
Early insights: The UIL created an initial data story that you can explore, with more coming soon. Do you have other hypotheses or validating data? If so, CCA would love to hear from you. Write to us at userinsights@cleancooking.org.

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Ensuring that end user subsidies are designed for those most likely to adopt clean cooking solutions

Description: End user subsidies for clean cooking are generally targeted using broad criteria, leading to inefficient allocation, which wastes public sector resources and risks distorting markets by reducing users’ willingness to pay. Through this project, the UIL is conducting experiments to reveal user behaviors and preferences that can inform the design of subsidies that maximize clean cooking adoption and minimize the risk of market distortion. This project is being conducted in Nairobi and Isiolo Counties, in partnership with Busara Center for Behavioral Economics with funding from Irish Aid.
Early insights: Explore our formative literature review.
Stay tuned: Findings will directly inform the design of several new clean cooking subsidy programs and the creation of a subsidy design playbook for program implementers, slated for release in Fall 2023.

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Designing and validating product labels that reduce information asymmetries for potential customers and increase sales of clean cooking products

Description: A variety of information asymmetries may interfere in potential users’ decision-making processes as they consider purchasing clean cooking products, limiting the adoption of solutions with long-term health and financial benefits. Through qualitative interviews and behavioral experiments, the UIL is exploring what information potential customers require when making the decision to purchase a clean cooking solution and how product labels can support this purchasing journey. Conducted in collaboration with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, this research will provide recommendations for the launch of an efficiency label that has been specifically designed for the Kenyan market, to be based on whether there is a measurable increase in demand for clean cooking products due to the presence of the label.
Early insights: Explore CCA’s formative literature review.
Stay tuned: Findings are expected in Fall 2023. Insights and recommendations will be provided to the Clean Cooking Association of Kenya, the Government of Kenya, and other stakeholders to inform the design of labeling and messaging efforts.

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Enhancing enterprises’ ability to ensure that the households will sustain primary use of clean cooking after purchase

Description: Many households that have adopted clean cooking solutions continue to use polluting fuels for substantial parts of their cooking. Understanding the factors that drive “fuel stacking” decisions is critical to incentivizing sustained use of clean cooking solutions, ultimately yielding greater health and environmental impacts and improving the commercial viability of clean cooking business models. This research is being conducted in Mukuru, Nairobi, in partnership with the University of Liverpool and the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) with customers of M-Gas, a PAYGO LPG operator in Kenya. The insights surfaced through this work will directly inform M-gas’ strategy, and non-commercially sensitive insights will contribute to broader knowledge on how to incentivize sustained use of clean cooking through behavioral interventions.
Stay Tuned: Based on this research, the UIL will develop an open-source tool that will enable other companies to perform similar research to reduce the probability of fuel stacking among their customers.

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Learn more about end users from CCA’s Reports & Tools database.

Building User Centricity in Your Organization

The UIL aims to support clean cooking enterprises, country governments, and other stakeholders to strengthen their organization’s user centricity. Based on UIL research and partnerships with clean cooking organizations, the UIL is identifying and testing actionable practices that organizations can take to become more user centric.

In 2023, the UIL is focusing on identifying pain points for customers of clean cooking enterprises, and supporting those enterprises to make changes that improve their customer experience. For example, the UIL is working with enterprises on an after sales design sprint to prototype new ways for enterprises to support their customers after their initial clean cooking purchase. Ultimately, the UIL seeks to ignite a transformation to fully customer-centric enterprises that gain competitive advantage by delivering more value for customers.

What the UIL Is Learning From Others

Applying Behavioral Science to Product: 10 Insights from 10 Years of Irrational Labs (link)
How to build a culture of customer centricity? Creative Confidence Podcast with Leslie Witt, Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health (link)
The Role of Social Relations in the Adoption of Improved Cookstoves (Stockholm Environment Institute) (link)
The CGAP Customer-Centric Guide (link)
Help People Feel Good About the Decisions They’ve Already Made (InsideBE) (link)

What Are We Missing?

CCA is building a User Insights Hub to make user research more digestible for businesses and practitioners. Please email userinsights@cleancooking.org to share any resources we should add or organizations we should be learning from.

Demand Catalyst

The User Insights Lab

How the UIL is Surfacing User Insights

Working with enterprises to design and deploy clean cooking solutions that serve the needs of tens of thousands of Haitian street vendors

Helping enterprises better understand their customers’ experiences and drive sustained use

Ensuring that end user subsidies are designed for those most likely to adopt clean cooking solutions

Designing and validating product labels that reduce information asymmetries for potential customers and increase sales of clean cooking products

Enhancing enterprises’ ability to ensure that the households will sustain primary use of clean cooking after purchase

Building User Centricity in Your Organization

What the UIL Is Learning From Others

What Are We Missing?

More from CCA Experts

Colm Fay

Ronan Ferguson

Pamela Lee

Jean-Louis Racine

April Warren

Demand Catalyst

The User Insights Lab

How the UIL is Surfacing User Insights

Working with enterprises to design and deploy clean cooking solutions that serve the needs of tens of thousands of Haitian street vendors

Helping enterprises better understand their customers’ experiences and drive sustained use

Ensuring that end user subsidies are designed for those most likely to adopt clean cooking solutions

Designing and validating product labels that reduce information asymmetries for potential customers and increase sales of clean cooking products

Enhancing enterprises’ ability to ensure that the households will sustain primary use of clean cooking after purchase

Building User Centricity in Your Organization

What the UIL Is Learning From Others

What Are We Missing?

More from CCA Experts

Colm Fay

Ronan Ferguson

Pamela Lee

Jean-Louis Racine

April Warren

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