Abstract
The aim of the study is to identify the growth of rural retailing in India with reference to Kolhapur district. A decade ago, the rural market was more unstructured and was not a prioritized target location for corporate. There were no innovative approach and advertisement campaigns. A distribution system did exist, but was feeble. Illiteracy and lack of technology were the other factors leading to the poor reach of merchandise and lower level of awareness amongst villagers. Gradually, corporate realized that there was saturation, stiff competition and clutter in the urban market, and a demand was building up in rural areas. Seeing the vast potential of 70% of Indians living in rural areas, they started focusing on these unexplored, high-potential areas. In India totally there are 5, 70,000 villages and nearly 60 percent of the rural income comes from agriculture. As a result, retail outlets have sprung up in practically all the villages that store merchandises of various brands and categories. To attract the customers, rural retailing requires separate retailing approach for the retailing mix elements include, Merchandise, Cost, Location and Advertisements which could be formulated after studying the market carefully. Merchandise itself might require modifications due to different nature of population, pricing have to be carefully designed since rural consumers unlike their urban counterparts spend less on consumer merchandise, location have to be decided for easy accessibility and promoting the merchandise to encourage the sales. Retailing Strategy is affected by various factors like Type of merchandise (Durable or non-durable), profile of target market, and facilities available for using retailing mix etc. Keywords: Retailing approach, Rural Retailers, Merchandise, Cost, Location, and Advertisement. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-13-05 Publication date: May 31 st 2020
Highlights
More than 617 million Indians (70.3%) of Indians population live in rural areas
Data generated by National Applied Council of applied Economic Research (NCAER) show that not less than 70% of all Indian sales in some merchandise categories come from rural India
It is inferred that the source of merchandise is mostly from manufacturers and the agriculturalist (30%) where these retailers get merchandise which is in chart 2
Summary
More than 617 million Indians (70.3%) of Indians population live in rural areas. They are distributed over a mindboggling 6, 30,000 villages. The large amorphous mass of rural India is verily a marketer’s delight. The gigantic market is being addressed as a spill off of the urban oriented communication. Be that as it may, some companies have hit the rural dirt tracks with some imaginative campaigns. This made us to study on the effective retailing approach used by the rural retailers
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