A study of bottlenecks pertaining to rural marketing

Abstract

Rural India has more than 70% population in 6.27 lakh villages, which has a huge market for FMCG brands. The entire income group purchases FMCG items, but their brands differ from each other. There are a number of problems faced by Indian marketers, including physical distribution, logistics, and deployment of sales force across huge geographical area, transportation and warehousing, and marketing communication as well as spurious products. Rural markets face the critical issues of distribution, understanding the rural consumer, communication and poor infrastructure. The study intends to understand the challenges pertaining to rural marketing with respect to villages of Coimbatore district and to analyze the variation in the effect of challenges across male and female respondents of rural areas. The study was conducted in rural areas of Coimbatore district, using a structured interview schedule. Factor analysis technique was used to identify the main bottlenecks prevailing in rural markets. The study calls for rural marketers to strengthen their direct marketing efforts and have a rethink on their rural marketing strategies, so as to emerge with feasible and innovative promotional & distribution programs to cover the vast stretched rural markets.