Rural E-marketing in Iran; Modeling villagers' intention and clustering rural regions

Abstract

The rural population of Iran has a serious need for ICT application to launch e-marketing in order to increase employment. The important point is that most villagers are small holders, and an e-marketing model should be proposed which is adopted and can be operationalized. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was modeling villagers’ intention to adopt e-marketing and performing rural provincial clustering. Data were collected from approximately 1000 villages with ICT offices in all provinces. The research model was designed in a way that the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was developed, and Rural Economy Geography was added as background. Therefore, the Geographic Model of Planned Behavior (GeoTPB) was proposed. The innovation of the current research is in using a combined model (behavioral and geographical) to adopt rural technology, which has presented a better understanding of adoption. Additionally, a two-stage structural equation modeling approach was used, which means that since the model was large and complicated, in the first stage, the non-significant paths were removed, and in the second stage, the model was simplified and proposed with the significant paths. This model predicted 76% of villagers’ intention to adopt e-marketing. Also, the K-means clustering showed that based on economic and behavioral factors, the rural districts of Iran constituted 6 clusters. The interesting point was that the southern and southeastern provinces of Iran, which have been reported by the statistics center to be the less developed areas, were found to be the superior cluster in e-marketing adoption in the results of the current research. Therefore, the villages of Sistan and Baluchestan and Hormozgan provinces will be suitable as pilot provinces for e-marketing implementation. Considering the results of the GeoTPB model, priority would better be given to villages with appropriate access and a population with the potential to use technology. Additionally, regarding the government’s aim to develop rural businesses, it is suggested that the Transaction Services Model be launched as the national business and the related facilities be provided.