The Hindu Business Line : Jo dikhta hai, wohi bikta hai

DONALD Rumsfeld said, "When someone with a rural accent says, `I don't know much about politics,' zip up your pockets." While that may explain the Lalu factor here, the caution that our manufacturers and marketers need now is against someone who with a salesman accent says, "I don't know much about `rural'." For, when LIC sells more than half of its policies in the six lakh-odd villages of India, 60 per cent of Rediffmail account holders are from small towns, and Kisan credit cards outnumber the four crore cards in urban areas, it would be a grave error not to have `rural' on your radar screen.

Thus, in The Rural Marketing Book, from Biztantra (www.biztantra.com/rm) , Pradeep Kashyap and Siddhartha Raut urge companies that want to succeed in the rural market to remember the mantra, Jo dikhta hai, wohi bikta hai, with a stress on access and availability. The other two `A's are awareness and affordability.

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the `cities of the world,' then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute `the rural areas of the world,' is how Lin Biao would like to classify. That may not be too helpful for marketers; so most companies in the FMCG sector define rural as any place with a population up to 20,000, while durable and agri-input companies have 50,000 as the ceiling, one learns from the book. Interestingly, for LG Electronics, rural/semi-urban area means "all cities other than the seven metros."

According to our Census, though, `rural' is any habitation with a population density of less than 400 per sq. km, where at least 75 per cent of the male working population is engaged in agriculture and where there exists no municipality or board, as the authors mention, and point out that out of the 6.4 lakh villages, only 20,000 villages have population more than 5,000. "Many towns are actually overgrown villages and are classified as towns only because they have municipalities," note the authors and cite a statistic that 90 per cent of durables purchased by rural people are from 1,900 towns in the 20,000-1,00,000 population strata.

How big is the rural market? Rs 1.23 lakh crore, including FMCGs, durables and agri products! Though rural households spend less than half of what is spent by the urban ones, they make up more than half of the total consumption in the country. And if that enthuses you to take the next bus to the nearest village, Kashyap and Raut advise you not to look at the near term gains only. Rural marketing is an investment for a better tomorrow; it has to be evolutionary, and not revolutionary, they state.

A chapter on consumer behaviour alerts you to "rural taste." While the urbanite likes lighter hues, prefers denims and cotton, goes to theme parks and cyberspace, and sees danger in red and safety in green, the rural resident goes for bold and primary colours, frequents cinemas and melas, wears synthetics, and sees in red happiness and auspiciousness.

Do you know that tractors are status symbols in rural areas? In Punjab, the HP of the tractor and the brand are important. A farmer owning a 50 HP tractor from Ford is a role model to emulate, say the authors. Therefore, a company may have to choose different brand ambassadors for the rural and urban markets. Among the examples in the book are Aamir Khan, who projects a `smart, colourful, youthful' personality for a cola company, and Sunny Deol who personifies the ruggedness and relaxedness of a tractor.

The authors' insight is that unlike the urban consumer, the rural buyer relies on information from opinion leaders and influencers, rather than the media. For high-involvement products the prospective purchaser may even like to visit the company outlet for personal interaction, say the authors and describe the `lengthy process' of buying tractor tyres. "The ultimate clincher is always the `touch and feel' experience. Anything less will not lead to a purchase. In rural India, seeing is not sufficient to believe, using is."

And that's something I'd say of the book too. A must-touch-and-read, because, as James Grahame wrote, mute may be "the voice of rural labour, hush'd the ploughboy's whistle, and the milkmaid's song"; but their cash isn't similarly mute or hush'd.

BookMark@thehindu.co.in

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Jo dikhta hai, wohi bikta hai