Selling in rural market

All the big shifts require huge investments in building hard and soft infrastructure - something that the government alone is in no position to bear. The Prime Minister has already talked about replacing publicly funded R&D in agriculture and rural infrastructure with a new private participation model. But the private sector will not step in till the larger environment itself is conducive for it to function smoothly. That is why a more favorable environment is being created, the market which is visualizing the shift of marketing concepts from urban to rural areas.

The rural ares hold tremendous potential both interms of profitability and long term growth. Now you will be curious to know that, what are the reasons that are creating such a drastic shift of marketers from urban to rural areas. I have listed here some of the potential reasons for this vibrating growth:

• Vast size and huge demand base
• Dense population
• Increase in total disposable income
• Increased agricultural outputs
• Dominant middle class
• Better IT infrastructure

The potential for market growth is obvious but the dominant players will be the retailers dealing with FMCG products and other consumer durables, that is why , we see the presence of early entrants like Hindustan Lever, Coca-Cola, LG Electronics, Britannia, Standard Life, Philips, Colgate Palmolive etc.

But there are lot of risks and uncertianities as well like,Low per capita disposable incomes, dependence on the vagaries of the monsoon; seasonal consumption linked to harvests and festivals, poor roads; power problems; and inaccessibility to conventional advertising media.

So the entrants should be well versed of the acceptible challenges as well and therefore need to have three attributes for long term and profitable survivorship,i.e being adaptible and mantaining the avaliability of necessary products and services by the aid of logistics and robust supply chain.

Mantain the proper care of rural affordability affordability by careful pricing techniques, as there is low per capita disposable income. Pricing is the key challenge here. The biggest challeneg is the acceptibility, whether the rural market will accept the urban trends are not. ?What will be the behavior and attitude of rural market towards urban tactics?

These are the questions that will wil be reavealed soon, and I am very excited to now the results..........