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Is there a shift in how rural India consumes? Some marketing experts think so. They feel rural marketing has gone beyond reaching out to buyers at haats and melas , as the group now engages for long periods with mobile phones, the television and print media.
A roundtable, “Rural Opportunities – Building Strategy into Action” held in the Capital this week explored the above question, while looking at how the rural consumer should be tapped.
Pradeep Kashyap, founder of consulting firm MART, felt that the rural market had evolved in the past 30 years and pilot projects were no longer needed. “Rural people have such a huge appetite for products that they cannot wait for companies to experiment, rather they want the products to be available at their nearest store,” he said, pointing out that there are over 400 million mobile phones operating in the hinterland.
He felt that the rural and small town market is much bigger than the urban market today and that companies need to venture out.
The roundtable concluded that the line between the urban and the rural is getting blurred and that the “story starts from the consumers.” The message obviously was, “go out there and make your product available”.
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