The Hindu Business Line : Paper on `Marketing to India's Underserved'

OGILVY & Mather's CEO, Mr John Goodman, and Mr Kunal Sinha, Executive Director (Discovery) O&M, are partnering with Professor John Quelch, Harvard Business School's Senior Associate Dean; Mr Lincoln Filene, Professor of Business Administration; and Mr Ajay Mookerjee, Executive Director, India Research Centre, Harvard Business School, on a paper on `Marketing to India's Underserved'. The paper will be presented by Mr Sinha at a conference on `Global Poverty - Business Solutions and Approaches', on Thursday at Harvard.

The aim of this conference, according to an O&M press release, is to explore how serving the poor can be a profitable business proposition that can help improve the lives of the world's four billion impoverished.

The other papers from India include ITC's e-choupal case and insights from Unilever's Project Shakti.

The release says that until the '90s, businesses in India focused only on the 50 million rich and middle class consumers, leaving the nation's 500 million poor underserved.

"As income levels of the poor have risen dramatically over the past decade so has the demand for the products and services purchased by low income consumers, creating a huge market potential. To capture this opportunity, an entirely different marketing approach is required. Logistically, distribution must be accommodated across more than one lakh geographically dispersed rural areas as well as 3,700 urban centres. Understanding consumer behaviour requires not merely studies of individual behaviour but immersion in community activities," says the release.

Ogilvy India, as per the release, has adapted participatory appraisal techniques including wealth and village mapping and timeline methodologies and developed media reach indices by socio-cultural and purchasing power segments. "Interviews conducted with sales and marketing managers during client assignments at companies that market goods and services revealed that approaches required to market to the poor differ significantly from marketing approaches employed with higher income markets."

Hindustan Lever, CavinKare, Castrol Engine Oils, Kodak, Bajaj Auto, and State Bank of India Credit Cards were some of the companies studied.

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