AO: The interview excerpts below demonstrate the need to carve out and establish a research company's unique value proposition in Nairobi's research market. It is important to also develop clear brand recognition for that value in order to develop collaborations across different groups. If you are going to be a good collaborator within the Nairobi research market, you don't want to be seen as stepping on someone else's established turf.
BC-MW-F-S-02 39:44
“…the second element, I guess is you don't necessarily want a client to think that you're incapable of doing this yourself. So by citing another person, it raises the question of "why are we hiring you? Are you able to carry out this work to completion? Or do you need to revive another organization's knowledge in order to get to this stage?" And so I think when you have those two things together, it prevents you from from really acknowledging things. But it just depends on how established the company is as well. So if you're a very established company, and everyone trusts you to be the expert, then you're probably going to be more comfortable with acknowledging people because it's fine, everyone knows you're great. Whereas if you're starting off, and you have more of that insecurity, of "I'm in competition with these different people, we haven't yet found our niche. People don't necessarily know that we're the experts in this area," then you don't want to flag up other companies that could in theory be contracted instead of you. So I guess it depends on the company as well.”
BC-MW-F-S-02 41:14
“...the new technical division around qualitative research and design...the reason why it doesn't have a name yet is because you don't want to call it a certain thing so that other people think you're now stepping in their territory. So it's meant to be an internal resource. But if people then see [REDACTED ORG NAME] is opening up a design department, then all the design or HCD firms will start thinking, are we going to be slowly creeping into their market and that's not the intention, but we're not going to have those conversations with them beforehand...”
