The Hindu Business Line : Portal on access rural marketing

The average villager buys ten FMCG products and twelve branded products every month, according to Mr M. Nachiappan, Creative and Managing Director, N & D Communications, a media-advertising agency.

He told the press that with India's rural population being 742 million, there is a potential rural goldmine for marketers to tap.

N & D Communications has developed www.ruralone.com, a portal that will help entrepreneurs and marketing managers access rural marketing data such as a list of the villages under their respective panchayats, relevant business contacts, purchase points, stock points, networking data, distribution methods and a socio-psychological profile of the region concerned.

The company has a network of State-wise hubs supported by 120 district-wise hubs, he said. Initially, the Web site will only provide information about Tamil Nadu, but will eventually spread to include all the States in the country.

Mr Nachiappan said that a 22-member development team worked on the Web site for the last 18 months. An investment of about Rs 80 lakh went into it, and he expects to spend about Rs 15 lakh every month in the day-to-day running of the Web site. Most of the investment will go into the gathering of the data rather than the software aspect of it, he said.

The revenue model for the portal is subscription based - a fee of Rs 30,000 would be charged per annum, with a maximum of 1,200 hours of usage. He said that he expects about 1,500 subscribers in the first year.

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