APPLESEED RADIO EPISODE 6 Ruth Chiang Hello it's Ruth [and Philip]! We're recording not from Guatemala today, but from Peru in a little mountain in the Andes called Lares. We've wrapped up the first phase of our project in Guatemala and now we're working with the team remotely while we travel and prepare for our next project. We're here imagining you sitting right next to us. Philip Kao Thanks for listening to Appleseed Radio. Appleseed began as an idea that we could create an organization and let us live and travel together while working to improve child nutrition the places that need it most. This show chronicles our attempt to turn that idea into reality. Ruth Chiang Today we'll be talking about just how different it is to do your job in a third world country; specifically, Philip's job, as a social marketing. And we're going to be doing something a little different. I'm going to take a backseat because you have another special guest today, Stephen Groner. Stephen is the founder and president of Stephen Groner Associates, or SGA, a social marketing firm in Long Beach, California. Not only is he a social marketing guru he's also Philip's mentor and former boss. We could think of no one better to help us sort out the differences in social marketing in Guatemala versus good ole California. Take it away guys! Philip Kao Hey Stephen, how's it going? Stephen Groner How are you? Ready to record? Philip Kao Yup yup ready. All ready. Stephen Groner OK! You're down in Peru now, but I'd like to take this back to when you were in Long Beach and how you actually got Appleseed started. Could you tell me what the origin of Appleseed was? Philip Kao Sure. Well I was still with SGA, and for several years we were working together and running projects but kind of in the back of my mind I always thought how interesting it might be to go back to where I was before. You know, third world countries, and taking everything that I learned at SGA and applying it there, where there are all these nonprofits and Peace Corps volunteers and all these people trying to do all this stuff and a lot of times they have a great solution for something but then nobody seems to be using marketing to actually change people's behavior and get them to change their lifestyle habits. So yeah I had this idea and then at around the same time Adam, who's still with you guys, he and I and my wife Ruth, a pediatrician, decided to start Appleseed. With Appleseed, our mission was to improve what children eat. We had a volunteer project with this urban farm in one of the projects of Long Beach. They had all these wonderful vegetables and they had this resident population who never ate vegetables. They faced all these issues like obesity, so we thought this would be a great project to try ourselves at. Stephen Groner So as I recall, that was a Core Time Project, and you applied CBSM Philip Kao Oh yeah. That was a Core Time project with us SGA where we had some paid time to just do whatever we wanted. And so that was kind of our passion project.

Stephen Groner So that was your starting point. This is when you were still working at SGA, but then you guys, you and Ruth, you set off on your own. Talk to me about your international experience with Appleseed. Philip Kao Right. This is only last year but it feels like a while ago. So August is when I transitioned out of SGA and and passed on my clients and said goodbye and then we went straight to Guatemala. Our mission, being improving what children eat, we went to Guatemala because that's the place with the worst malnutrition in the entire Western Hemisphere. Actually one of the worst in the world where a lot of kids don't grow. A lot of them have a condition called stunting where they're just chronically malnourished and their brains don't develop they don't grow very tall and this affects them throughout life. It's a terrible condition. And so we went there to partner with Semilla Nueva, an organization on the ground, one of those really good organizations but just didn't know how to get people to accept the solution that they were giving them. What they had, their solution, was this high protein corn. And if people would just eat it, because they eat tortillas three times a day, it would literally just transform the country. If you can get them to eat protein early in life they can actually avoid stunting. So we helped them by doing an entire social marketing project start to finish from research all the way to campaign launch. And that was this spring. Stephen Groner So take me through that a little. How did you figure out what the barriers were, and what were potential motivators for changing people's interest in this? Philip Kao The first thing was, we did what we always do, right? We started with listening, with research. I mean you've got to know your audience, and no two audiences are the same. So we went into these farming communities talked to a bunch of people and ultimately we put out a report and a lot of the findings were kind of a surprise to our partners who had who had been there for seven years. So that was our first step. Stephen Groner And what were some of the surprises you found? Philip Kao In Guatemala you would think, with everyone facing this malnutrition problem, that they would know what it was. But most people didn't. Or some of them kind of knew, but didn't think it affected them. Another was that people thought all corn was highly nutritious, because it's just part of their origin story, being indigenous Mayans. They thought that all corn was nutritious, but they didn't know that corn really had almost nothing. We also found that people didn't care about protein. They didn't know much about it and they didn't care about it. So our partners, they're telling people how important it was to eat this corn because it had protein... that just didn't make sense to anybody. Instead, people cared about family. They care about providing for family; they're very insecure about that, because obviously they're living below the poverty line. Also they care about strength and energy

and the immediate benefits of eating something with better nutrition rather than the long term health benefits. Stephen Groner How were you able to get them to trust you and talk to you about these pretty personal and intimate issues about their food habits and what they believe? Philip Kao Our partners have good relationships with people in their communities, so we'd go in with someone we knew and that really helped. And then on top of that, with Ruth being a pediatrician, you know these are kids who have never seen a doctor, let alone a first-world American doctor, that was huge. The women were just super happy to just give us the time to talk to us. With that I had unprecedented market research access. But one thing that really helped, totally unexpected, was that we're Chinese! We're Taiwanese, both of us, and we look Chinese and for whatever reason I don't know exactly why -- I've been trying to figure it out for months -- but Guatemalans apparently really like Chinese people. They just really trust us for some reason. One thing might be because in the past 20 or 30 years ago, there were people from Taiwan who came to build relationships with Guatemala for political reasons, and they helped the farmers out a lot. And I think that's remembered. So all these different things kind of helped us. Stephen Groner When I read that report there were some very specific individuals who had, if you will, heightened influence within the community. People you could really turn to. Could you describe what their perspective was, and how you worked with them as well? Philip Kao Yeah. Back when we were about to launch the campaign, we had done what I thought were all the hard parts. We had done all the research, we had strategized and figured out we needed a whole new brand for this corn, and we gave it a new name and we even had a slogan, and logo, and all this stuff. Well the thing is it makes no difference what the brand looked like if it didn't actually get out into the communities. Obviously you don't want a bunch of gringos showing up in the middle of the community, trying to promote this new corn, because that wasn't going to work. So our partners at Semilla Nueva, who have been working in this region for seven or eight years, have these coordinators and promoters - people who live in the communities, and there are 25 different communities in this region. Our plan was to get these folks to do a training on the brand, and that way, they could carry out the message farmer to farmer. That's something we probably would have done at SGA too, to try to cultivate some champions. But the part that was different was maybe how we went about training them. Like I said we had this brand, and I wanted people to stop talking about protein. So I worked really hard with my team to get everything down to this one page branding guide. We really just needed to communicate this. Now the problem was that very few people in these communities ever made it past the third grade, so I couldn't just email this out or something. The only way to do it was orally. We did the training. These guys they listened very patiently, and the cool thing is they memorized everything because they don't read or write very well. They all made it their own. Eventually we got the brand across.

Later following up, [the farmers] went back to the communities, put up posters, talked to people, answered questions, had countless conversations with their neighbors... They just mobilized - in a way that I feel like never would have happened in the US. A few weeks later when it came time to get the seed, thousands of people showed up. And so... Stephen Groner Thousands of people? Wow! Philip Kao Yeah, thousands of people in these 25 communities - over 3,000 families got seed, and it started with these twenty five. We did do an event and we did some other stuff, but these were the core people who carried the brand back to their communities. Stephen Groner So what was the secret sauce? What was it that they did that was so persuasive? It sounds like there was a change from what they were talking about before to now this new brand... is it how they talked? Was it who they were? Was it what they said? Was it a combination? Philip Kao It was a few things. One, I think, was that we first got them really on board. They fell in love with the brand. It was farmers just like them who we worked with to develop the brand. And so we came up with a really great name, FORTALEZA, which gets at these feelings of strength and fortitude that we found out from our research that farmers really wanted. But more than that, we we hit them at a personal level. We talked about real issues that people faced. In front of the whole group, we asked one guy: "Do you have a kid?" "Yeah, of course. I have four". "Well how are they doing in school?" or "How do you make sure that they're getting the best? or eating the best?". And that kind of got to this vulnerable conflict that they have and they were like, "oh, well I'm not sure what's the best thing to give them..." So starting there, then we showed them that's what FORTALEZA is all about. This is the corn for your family. It's the corn that would be great for your kids. It's going to give them the energy they need more than regular corn. So I think that was the first step. They really got bought in. They felt like they finally had something tangible that they could go back to their communities with. Something that they knew would be good for their neighbors. So that was one. I think they had a lot of enthusiasm and a sense of purpose. They all went back to the communities and did what they needed to do. They put posters up in all these different places like tiendas, which are these little convenience stores that every community has. They put them up at the corn mills where women would go every morning. And the thing about Guatemala is there's no red tape. You can just put stuff up. You don't really have to get permission from anybody. Nobody cares. It's like the U.S. maybe 150 years ago. From a marketing standpoint, that's really neat because everyone just mobilized. And a lot of them even went the extra mile and they got these megaphone announcements to drive around town to broadcast the date and time where people would need to show up if they want to learn about this new seed. And yeah, it worked. Pretty amazing. Stephen Groner Wow. So they showed up to get this corn. It sounded extremely successful. So what's the next step? How does it move forward from here? Philip Kao Well this first year, with the average family size at about six, so we got it right around 20,000

this year. We really want to scale it up. So right now we have a team member who joined us named Ledvi. She's on the ground in Guatemala keeping things going. She's doing a campaign to get people to properly store grain. If you can prevent pests, you can actually replant it next year. But on top of that we want to scale up by getting this high protein FORTALEZA seed into the commercial supply, where people can plant it and sell it, on top of eating it. And if we can do that it's going to scale tremendously, getting into a whole order of magnitude of more people eating this bio-fortified corn. So that's next year. Stephen Groner So going back to the campaign, what were some of the things you were able to take away from your work in California at SGA that really worked, and what were some of the things that you had to innovate on the fly down in Guatemala, that you needed to figure out? Philip Kao A LOT applied! I mean, it's literally taking everything that I learned at SGA and applying it. The biggest part is doing really good research up front. Now there were a lot of little squirrelly things that I never could have prepared for… I got Giardia a couple times and Chikungunya, which is in the same family as Dengue and Zika... just a terrible mosquito-borne disease. Didn't really factor that in, but I guess there are always obstacles. Oh! So I was telling you about this branding guide, this one pager that we had. I needed to print this thing and the training was scheduled for 10 a.m. so I got up early. At SGA maybe I would ask an intern or something and tell them what I needed and they they'd go into the copy room and... Stephen Groner You don't have have a copy room, down in Guatemala. Philip Kao [Laughs] That's right. Anyway, we needed to train these guys up, and I needed to print this thing, so I just drove to town. The first place I went I found out from the printer that you have to bring your own papers so... no problem. I went to this little stationery store. The thing is, they sell paper by the sheet. They literally ask how much paper you want, and then they just count out sheets by hand and then they handwrite all receipts and it takes 20 minutes. It's all good. I got my paper. And then I needed to print it so I went and found an Internet cafe. The way to do it here is you get one page printed and then you make photocopies of that because Photocopies are cheap. Took maybe 30 minutes. Got it printed and said thank you. And after you know 10 minutes of receipt writing I had to drive to another place that actually had a Xerox machine. And then got those made. All said and done, I had to visit three or four different places and it took me to two full hours just to get these these copies made. And yeah that was just one of those things. Stephen Groner [Laughs] So what’s your next step for Appleseed? Philip Kao We're continuing to work with our partners in Guatemala. Ruth and I are actually going to be back there in January and in the meantime between now and the end of the year we're trying to start a new project in Asia, probably Taiwan where there's some malnutrition problems with the indigenous tribes there. Zooming out a little bit, our long term picture is to get it to a point where the organization can stand on its own. Start maybe paying salaries a little bit. So that's kind of our dream and hopefully we can get there.

But in the meantime we're just focused on making impact and getting results. So yeah, just doing the work we love. Stephen Groner Wow, that's excellent; sounds very exciting. OK, well thank you! That's great. Good luck with the rest of your travels in Peru, and keep me posted. Philip Kao OK. Thanks a bunch. Yeah, we’ll be in touch. Stephen Groner Take care. Philip Kao All right. Later, Stephen. That's it for our show today! Big thanks to Stephen Groner and his team for sharing this episode on the SGA blog, which always has interesting content, and thank you all for listening. Ruth Chiang Wait, Philip! Our website! Philip Kao Oh that's right! Before you go, I am excited to announce that we've launched a new website! It's appleseedimpact.org. Go there if you're a new listener and want to check out past episodes or subscribe, or if you're a loyal listener and you want to see some photos or something visual to go with all that you've heard. Again, that's appleseedimpact.org. You can also go there to make a donation. We don't ask for this often, but if you liked what you heard, or if listening has made your day a little better, PLEASE SUPPORT US! For the time being, everything we're doing is still completely voluntary, so we really do need your help. With more funding we can pay for things you heard about in the show, like transportation, printing, and other project costs that allow us to keep bringing social marketing to the developing world. With your help, we can keep providing our professional services to our nonprofit partners on the ground, in the places that need it most, to truly improve what children eat. Anyway, to donate and more, please visit APPLESEED IMPACT DOT ORG, O-R-G. And many many thanks in advance. Ruth Chiang Yeah, thanks a bunch. Talk to ya soon! Philip Kao Seeya!