Shopping behavior of rural consumer migrated to urban area in the Indian context - An emerging market

Abstract

The urban- rural inequality in market, as well as customer characteristics bring a major difference in shopping behavior and consumption pattern of the two communities. In India, a sizeable number of persons migrate from rural to urban in search of job opportunities, work, education, marriage and personal reasons. From the marketing perspective, migration leads to new market opportunities. And so, marketers have to come out with appropriate strategies to attract and retain migrants. In India a limited research studies has been done in this regard. Convenient sampling technique is used in this study. The survey was conducted among 74 students who have migrated from rural to urban region. They were selected from 3 different engineering colleges. The results reveal that the migrated consumers consider the following dimensions when shopping in the urban environment: they are shopping conscious, enjoy urban shopping environment, price and quality conscious, and compare different shops when buying. They want shopping to be recreational, price worthy, perfect and buyer oriented. They are unhappy with poor shopping environment, if any. These dimensions describe the factors to which the migrant rural consumers give importance in the urban shopping environment. Key words: Rural, urban, buying behavior, migration, migrants.