Market Update, on 02 March 2020, invited Rachmad Hidayat from water.org to share about stakeholder partnership as business’ practice in this century.

Water.org has empowered more than 27 million people from the middle low class income with access to safe water or sanitation. Access to safe water directly helps the most vulnerable families around the world prepare and protect themselves from illness and pandemic. They will experience improved health because access to safe water means they can practice good hygiene like handwashing (www.water.org).

He said that in this century in order to achieve the same goal, forming partnership between stakeholder was very important. Multistakeholder partnership was Goals number 17 in UN Sustainable Development Goals. Since each stakeholder had different needs and different desires, we should be able to make offers that met their needs and crafted the strategy around it. If the target was government/private sector, we had to show how our activities could  support their objectives in providing water for the citizens. We might propose location data or surveys to mitigate the risk.

For financial institution, the proposal might consists of targeting relevant market segments so that the funding could be right on target, the risk was mitigated and build the right branding proposition. And when  proposing to the community, the content of proposal should include shared benefits and values, show confidence about their capacity and share best practice. Partnership was difficult because most of the time, our goals might not be in line with the stakeholders’ needs and it could be a costly process.

The practice of water.org in crafting different proposition to match the need of the partner was an example of a discipline in marketing which is STP strategy (segmentation, targeting and positioning), the core marketing strategy. (Reported by Farhansyah & Ina Murwani)