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There is hardly any difference in consumer behaviour across rural and urban divide in India now, market researchers, advertising and marketing experts said here at an event organised by the Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry on Saturday.
Arindam Sengupta, Principal Technologist – Consumer Insights, ITC Ltd, said that rural customers clearly asserted their position as equals along with their urban counterparts.
“Being there and be counted has been the key behaviour of rural India in the recent years,” he added.
MG Parameswaran, ED & CEO of ULKA, said rural India actually spurns differentiated products. “LG’s attempt at marketing such a differentiated TV set Sampurna flopped,” Parameswarn pointed out.
They wanted similar product that was available in the urban market with facilities that could take care of power outages and voltage fluctuations.
Marketers were now moving towards closer tracking of their preferences. TV viewerships or social media monitoring provides tools to understand their mind.
According to Pradeep Kashyap, CEO of MART, studies suggested that the growth of Facebook signing-ins in rural areas were now far greater than in urban India.
Recent IMRB studies suggested that consumer behaviour in rural market was same that of urban market. “Like in urban market, consumers in the rural market are not averse to trying out new baby food to breakfast cereals,” said Gurpreet Wasi, Principal consultant, Retail, at IMRB.
However, there are differences in case of certain products. For example, in northern rural market, Wasi said, there was a resistance in buying refrigerators. “Women in the family believed that food preserved in the freezer was stale and not worthy of human consumption or water stored in the freezer developed unwanted germs,” she explained.
Expansion of English education, intervention of technology in democratisation of the market and growing role of women and children in consumption decisions of family have helped marketers to target greater surplus income in the rural market more than in the urban market in recent years.
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