Interface Platforms Usability for Gold Marketing: A Study of Selected Gold Miners in Migori County- Kenya

Abstract

Gold marketing like any other modern product marketing should be done in a global based platform, to ensure suitable buying with best prices possible in a timely way. However, gold marketing in developing countries Kenya inclusive still rely on middlemen marketing strategies, despite of having advanced and efficient marketing information technological opportunities as the trend has not picked well in some of the developing and third world nations. The objectives of this study were to: (i) examine the type of interfaces currently being used by miners to market gold; (ii) identify type of calls the miners are able to make to create awareness that they have gold to sell; and (iii) find out the ability of the miners to send and retrieve text messages using mobile phones. The findings of the study showed that there exist various types of user interfaces for gold marketing with the most popular being Audio phone calls (37.7%). The findings further indicated that a good number of gold miners still rely on the tradition of waiting for brokers at the mines (22.6%), to buy their gold what is called on site traders. On the other hand, it was realized that, the miners’ ability to send and retrieve text messages using the mobile phones was at (94.34%). The study recommends a need to design an interface model to enable integration of mobile phones (USSD code technology) as a suitable interface for gold marketing in Migori County to promote timely marketing with better pricing, ease of use and access of the interface by marketers. This will lead to adoption of Business to Business (B2B) marketing strategy whereby gold miners sell their gold to buyers who also sell to middlemen or manufacturing industries.