#33 Marketing to Emerging Markets (Juvo)

Should your app be marketed to developing countries? Roughly 75% of the world uses prepaid phones, where mobile plays a massive role in the lives of consumers. Today’s guest shares his expert insights in marketing a mobile app product to emerging markets.

Meet Josh Gosliner, senior director of product marketing at Juvo. Currently serving 26 counties (and counting), Juvo enables people who are underbanked to start building a credit history by lending instant loans for phone credit in developing markets via their mobile app.

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• Is it challenging to get your product adopted?
• How to do you manage the negative connotation of taking a loan in your marketing strategy?
• What is the role that mobile plays in these emerging markets? And how might that be different from what we see here in the U.S. or in Europe?
• How do you make consumers aware of your financial credit building services?
• What is the future for Juvo in 2020 and how will you get there?

• 8:58 What is Juvo?
• 12:02 Leveraging phone carrier data to inform marketing messages
• 13:32 How to manage consumers’ preconceptions about a product
• 15:22 The massive role of mobile in emerging markets
• 16:00 Challenges of mobile app marketing for Juvo
• 20:54 Give people what they need when they need it, progressively
• 24:06 Juvo’s goals looking forward

(12:31-13:04) “One of the things we’re really working on optimizing right now is what is the flow or the journey that somebody goes on from once they get that message? Is it a message that then takes them to the app store to download an app to sign up to then take the loan? Or is it something where we can make it as simple as responding to that text message? There’s a number of ways in which people prefer to interact with their mobile operator or services in general. And optimizing that is a really big part of our go-to-market and our growth strategy.”

(15:23-15:48) “I think emerging markets, in general, are mobile-first. There’s a small slice of the population that has access to computers and has had that for some time. But for the vast majority of people, a mobile device is in many instances the first time that people are getting access to the internet. And so, it really is a much more transformative piece of technology.

(17:38-17:48) “We are constantly doing funnel analysis. And every point of the journey in which we can reduce friction, that’s our number one priority.