Challenges and Opportunities of Indian Rural Market

Abstract

Recently, the growth of the Indian economy after starting of liberalization and globalisation policy in 1991 hasbeen substantial increase in the purchasing power of the rural habitants. Since Green revolution in India, the ruralareas are started to use a large quantity of consumable and non-consumable products. In this way, ruralmarketing has been used as a strategy to combat against the competition by the marketers. The rural marketingand agricultural marketing prior to globalisation of Indian economy convey the same meaning, but after wardsboth understand by the markets in different context– the later denotes agricultural and rural production of the forthe urban consumers or industrial consumers, whereas rural marketing involves marketing of manufactured orprocessed inputs to rural consumers. These have changed the entire spectrum of marketing for the Indian ruralmarket and force the marketers to move towards rural areas. Rural marketing in India is still at infancy stages,and faces the various types of problems in respect of marketing, product designing and positioning, pricing,distribution and promotion. Today’s corporation must understand the rural market on different context to widentheir business horizon, to expand their market and to exploiting the opportunities available in the rural areas. TheIndian rural market is bigger and vast in size with its lager consumer base, its offers the great opportunities forthe marketer and stay tune with the rural marketing offerings. Rural marketing consists of around 833 millionpotential consumers, and majority of the Indian middle-class, and about half the country's disposable income.The marketer must understand the growing complexities of the rural market and making strategy for the propermixing of marketing mix. It involves high risk and attractive for those who are searching challenge and having acourage to face those challenges. The key to face the challenges is to understand the market, the consumer needand behaviour.Hence, it is proposed to undertake in this study to assess the various dimension of Indian rural markets. The mainaim of this study is to observe the potentiality of Indian Rural Markets and finding out various problems arebeing faced by rural markets. This paper attempts to look into the challenges and opportunities of Indian ruralmarketing by adopting SWOT analysis matrix on rural markets.