Indian Rural Market Research Articles

Neuromarketing: Its Potential Role in Indian Rural Markets

Neuromarketing is one of the emerging discipline which is an applied extension of Neuroscience and Marketing. Neuromarketing helps us to understand the human mind and how brain influences our purchase intention. Rural consumers are complex, diverse in nature and neuromarketing can provide better insights about their purchase intentions.

Profiling Indian rural markets for supply chain management

The Indian rural market is set to become a billion dollar market in the years to come. With over 70% of the economy centred on the rural parts of the country, the marketers are now seeking ways to address this issue, as immense potential is latent in the rural parts of the country. In order to understand the rural supply chain (RSC) better, an attempt was made to identify the factors that are pertinent in the Indian context. After identifying these factors, data was collected pertaining to various dimensions that would provide an indication to these factors. The data was collected for rural regions of the major states in India. The data for the rural districts of a particular state was also collected as a sample so as to conduct a focused study. Appropriate tools were used to group the states of the country and the districts of that state. The results thus obtained would help marketers to evolve strategies looking at the communalities involved among the rural regions, the details of which are presented in this paper.

Rural Marketing in India Challenges and Opportunities

Around the world, four billion people live in poverty. And marketing firms are still struggling to turn them into customers. For the past decade, business visionaries have argued that these people, dubbed the “Base of the Pyramid”, make up an enormous, untapped market. Some of the world's biggest, savviest corporations have aimed to address their basic needs — by selling them everything from clean water to electricity and from FMCG to consumer durables. “Improving the lives of billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid is a noble endeavour. It can also be a lucrative one.” C.K. Prahlad. The paper studies the changing scenario of Indian rural markets and implies some suggestions in improving the marketing strategy in rural selling and market promotion. An improved marketing mix is the call of hour, with strategies framed by deeply considering the dynamic rural buying behaviour. This is in context of Indian rural market which is stands tall due to its cultural diversity. This throws an open ground challenge to the marketers in a country with multi-cultural, multi-lingual varsity. This paper is an attempt to provide some mettle solutions to these challenges as it studies and follows some successful rural marketing strategies of modern times. This is particular in context of rural sales strategies rural promotion mix.

Challenges and Opportunities of Indian Rural Market

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.

Consumer Buying Behaviour and Brand Loyalty in Rural Markets: FMCG

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently talked about his vision for rural India: My vision of rural India is of a modern agrarian, industrial and services economy co-existing side by side, where people can live in well- equipped villages and commute easily to work, be it on the farm or in the non-farm economy. There is much that modern science and technology can do to realize this vision. Rural incomes have to be increased. Rural infrastructure has to be improved. Rural health and education needs have to be met. Employment opportunities have to be created in rural 'Go rural' is the slogan of marketing gurus after analyzing the socio-economic changes in villages. The Rural population is nearly three times the urban, so that Rural consumers have become the prime target market for consumer durable and non-durable products, food, construction, electrical, electronics, automobiles, banks, insurance companies and other sectors besides hundred per cent of agri-input products such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery. The Indian rural market today accounts for only about Rs. 8 billion of the total ad pie of Rs 120 billion, thus claiming 6.6 per cent of the total share. So clearly, there seems to be a long way ahead. Although a lot is spoken about the immense potential of the unexplored rural market, advertisers and companies find it easier to vie for a share of the already divided urban pie.The success of a brand in the Indian rural market is as unpredictable as rain. It has always been difficult to gauge the rural market. Many brands, which should have been successful, have failed miserably. More often than not, people attribute rural market success to luck. Therefore, marketers need to understand the social dynamics and attitude variations within each village. Though, nationally it follows a consistent pattern looking at the challenges and the opportunities which rural markets offer to the marketers it can be said that the future is very promising for those who can understand the dynamics of rural markets and exploit them to their best advantage. A radical change in attitudes of marketers towards the vibrant and burgeoning rural markets is called for, so they can successfully impress on the 230 million rural consumers spread over approximately six hundred thousand villages in rural India.The Indian established Industries have the advantages, which MNC do not enjoy in this regard. The strong Indian brands have strong brand equity, consumer demand-pull and efficient and dedicated dealer network which have been created over a period of time. The brand has to be made relevant by understanding local needs. Even offering the same product in different regions with different brand names could be adopted as a strategy. At times, it is difficult to pass on an innovation over an existing product to the rural consumer unlike his urban counterpart - like increased calcium or herbal content or a germ-control formula in toothpaste.The rural market has a grip of strong country shops, which affect the sale of various products in rural market. The companies are trying to trigger growth in rural areas. They are identifying the fact that rural people are now in the better position with disposable income. The low rate finance availability has also increased the affordability of purchasing the costly products by the rural people. Marketer should understand the price sensitivity of a consumer in a rural area. This paper is therefore an attempt to promote the brand image in the rural market

Reaching the bottom of the pyramid: micro life insurance in India

Subject area International business/International marketing. Study level/applicability Courses: the case is directly related to courses on “International Business” and “International Marketing” in the Master of Business Administration programme. Training programmes: management development programmes for working executives, on the topics “Business across borders”, “Business stabilization in foreign markets”. Case overview In 1999, the liberalization of the insurance sector as per the recommendations of the Malhotra committee gave way for privatization and foreign firms entered this sector through joint ventures. The business growth, which was enjoyed by these firms from 1999 to 2008, was tremendous. The growth percentage started declining following the global economic downturn in the capital markets. This situation compelled the insurance firms to re-look into their business strategy. On one hand whatever growth they had, 80 percent of it was through unit linked insurance plans depending on the capital market. On the other, it was identified that in a country like India the untapped market potential was among the rural millions. Reaching those people who are at the bottom of the pyramid necessitated a completely new business model to be developed as the need of the hour. The take stock of the position at this vnjuncture is the crux of the present case study, which envisages finding out alternative delivery models to suit the Indian rural market taking into account the intrinsic nature of life insurance and the basic living styles and mentality of the rural folk. Expected learning outcomes After discussion and analysis of this case, students will be able to: understand how market culture in a target country differs from that in the home country; appreciate how challenges in a developing country market have their own unique features to be understood; identify various courses of action and evaluate them on the basis of the host country factors; understand the “international planning process”; and appreciate how important it is for a country manager of a multinational firm to plan and execute the marketing mix suited to the inherent qualities of the target market. Supplementary materials Teaching notes.

Rural Entrepreneurship: A Conceptual Understanding with Special Reference to Small Business in Rural India

Many Indian companies including MNCs and other large players started developing business strategies to taped the untapped market like rural market in case of India but ultimately the winner would be the one with the required resources like man, money, machine, material, market, methods, mission and motivation also with the much needed innovative and creative ideas to tap the untapped market like Indian rural market. The findings of the secondary data review will help the stakeholders to know various positive aspects and the need of rural entrepreneurship. It may be helpful for the various agencies to formulate plans and policies to boost the rural entrepreneurship in India which may help to make the Indian rural market as a critical force in global economy.

Manage India - The Strategic Management of Corporate and Social Sector

Amazingly, the economists, corporate players who used to make predictions about the economy or the growth of the corporate sector even for 2025, 2050…. were not able to foresee the monster of recession even few months in advance. Before the recession, economists, corporate players were talking about the requirement of the manpower paucity in future for matching the economical growth. Amazingly, professionals made liberal predictions of economy and manpower requirement in 2015, 2020, 2030, 2050….but there was no serious prediction about the millions of people losing the jobs in next few months. Till the start of 2008, when overall world economy was doing better and corporate sector was growing by leaps and bounds, nobody predicted that in just few months, the economy would be crippled and a country like USA would be sucked in the black hole of recession. Interestingly, decision makers, and economists are considered experts in giving direction to the overall economical growth, but on many occasions, and this time around also, they failed miserably in steering the economy on the slippery road of recession. The monster of deflation came out of its old grave and caught these so called future economic/business predictors unaware about this new development. The recent economic crisis has put a big question mark on the worthiness of the existing economical models/concepts and also on the vision and the capabilities of so called economists and the decision makers of both government and corporate sector. India is so vast and diverse that the impact of difficult times varied from state to state, city to city, town to town, village to village. The Indian corporate sector, people, economists and government were far more worried about the impact of the global recession than of the unfortunate Mumbai and Pune attacks. The severe effects of the slowdown did not harm much as more than 60 percent of the population in India is engaged directly or indirectly with the agriculture sector, which is intensively and extensively labor oriented and highly socialized. More than 80 percent of Indian families depending on agriculture are in rural areas with moderate exposure to the products manufactured and marketed by the corporate sector. Being part of the bottom of the pyramid, this segment has been explored till now by few corporate organizations only. These organizations are satisfying hardly few needs of this low income segment through their products (normally low price with optimum quality) which is unevenly spread geographically throughout the country. In fact, the products of cottage industry and unorganized local traditional industry have penetrated the Indian rural market deeply.

Rural Marketing: The New Paradigm

With more than 700 million people living in rural areas, in some 5, 80,000 villages, and with about two- thirds of its workforce engaged in agriculture and allied activities with a contribution of 29 percent to India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), India's economy is predominantly rural in character. Increase in competition, saturated urban markets, new product demanding urban customers have made the companies think about new potential rural markets. Thus, Indian rural markets have caught the attention of many companies, advertisers and multinational companies. According to a recent survey conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the purchasing power of the rural people has increased due to increase in productivity and better price commanded by the agricultural products. In economics, this rural market is termed as the bottom of the pyramid and it is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. By and large, the rise in purchasing power of rural people remains unexploited and with the growing reach of the television, it is now quite easy for the marketers to capture these markets. Rural marketing has become the latest mantra of most of the corporates.Companies like Hindustan Lever, Colgate Palmolive, Britannia and even Multinational Companies (MNCs) like Pepsi, Coca Cola, L.G., Philips, and Cavin Kare are all eyeing rural markets to capture the large Indian rural market. The article attempts to provide insights into the Indian Bottom of the Pyramid market segment and the potential it could offer to a multinational company to expand its market and build a global base here. The Indian economy is growing at an annual rate of 8 percent. This growth is considerable when compared to the growth of European countries, which is less than 2 percent on a 10-year average, and the growth of the American economy, which is approximately 3 percent. Moreover, there has been significant reduction in poverty levels and increase in quality consciousness among the Indian rural and urban consumers who were 'under-served' in the past 10 years. This changing scenario in the Indian economy could translate into an investment opportunity for many multinational companies. The NCAER analysis shows an increase of over 150 percent in the number of consumer class households in the last 10 years. This emergence of the BOP segment could be defined as a new consumer market. The BOP market in India comprises of a population of 750 million (70 percent of the population) living in 600,000 villages (rural area).

Rural Marketing: The New Paradigm

With more than 700 million people living in rural areas, in some 5, 80,000 villages, and with about two- thirds of its workforce engaged in agriculture and allied activities with a contribution of 29 percent to India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), India's economy is predominantly rural in character. Increase in competition, saturated urban markets, new product demanding urban customers have made the companies think about new potential rural markets. Thus, Indian rural markets have caught the attention of many companies, advertisers and multinational companies. According to a recent survey conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the purchasing power of the rural people has increased due to increase in productivity and better price commanded by the agricultural products. In economics, this rural market is termed as the bottom of the pyramid and it is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. By and large, the rise in purchasing power of rural people remains unexploited and with the growing reach of the television, it is now quite easy for the marketers to capture these markets. Rural marketing has become the latest mantra of most of the corporates.Companies like Hindustan Lever, Colgate Palmolive, Britannia and even Multinational Companies (MNCs) like Pepsi, Coca Cola, L.G., Philips, and Cavin Kare are all eyeing rural markets to capture the large Indian rural market. The article attempts to provide insights into the Indian Bottom of the Pyramid market segment and the potential it could offer to a multinational company to expand its market and build a global base here. The Indian economy is growing at an annual rate of 8 percent. This growth is considerable when compared to the growth of European countries, which is less than 2 percent on a 10-year average, and the growth of the American economy, which is approximately 3 percent. Moreover, there has been significant reduction in poverty levels and increase in quality consciousness among the Indian rural and urban consumers who were 'under-served' in the past 10 years. This changing scenario in the Indian economy could translate into an investment opportunity for many multinational companies. The NCAER analysis shows an increase of over 150 percent in the number of consumer class households in the last 10 years. This emergence of the BOP segment could be defined as a new consumer market. The BOP market in India comprises of a population of 750 million (70 percent of the population) living in 600,000 villages (rural area).

Mobile Phones to Ring Louder in Rural India

This article tries to analyze the penetration of the mobile phones in the rural market and the strategies adopted by the telecom companies to enter the Indian Rural Market. Most of the companies in the telecom sector have realized that the urban markets have saturated and to increase their subscriber base they have to tap the rural market. The article analyze various initiative taken by the various service providers and handset manufacturers to increase their presence in the under-penetrated rural areas.

A Rural-Urban Study on Purchase Behaviour Towards Toiletries

The Indian rural market has immense potential that is still largely untapped. Rural market's importance arises out of the fact that majority of India lives in villages. Both literally and metaphorically, this is true. There are about 6,27,000 villages in India with a population more than 680 million. A NCAER study reveals that 60% of value of Indian market lies with lower and lower-middle income group and 10% with upper income or at the upper class end. But when we compare rural and urban, little under half the value of market lies in lower and lower middle in urban India. While in rural India, 75% of value of market lies in these two income groups. Present paper is an attempt to examine the comparative purchase behaviour of rural and urban consumers of Gurdaspur towards toiletries namely, toothpaste, shampoo, bathing soaps and detergents with the help of Z test. Based on the results, some useful implications have been suggested for the marketers of toiletries.

Rural interest rates in the Indian economy

In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze some of the major features of the interest‐rates in the Indian rural money market. Such a market is distinguished by its duality, with the unorganised sector largely dominating the supply of funds even today. Rural interest‐rates are largely explained by risk and uncertainty rather than by the monopoly power of the moneylenders, though monopoly profit may have existed in some cases. A theoretical model is then constructed and statistical tests show positive correlation between farmers’ income and repayments and negative correlation between the interest‐rate, on the one hand, and income, repayments and monetization on the other. Thus, a rise in farm incomes may reduce the risk premium and, therefore, rural interest‐rates. Further econometric study revealed that the bank rate is more likely to be the leader than the follower of the bazaar rate.