The changing face of rural marketing: its unused ability in India

In recent years, rural markets have acquired importance, as the overall growth of the economy has resulted into considerable increase in the purchasing power of the rural people and preferences of rural people are also getting changed. So, every marketing player is keen to invest in rural markets. Though there is huge potential and substantial growth opportunities in the rural markets, yet there are some challenges too, which caused hurdles in tapping rural markets. This study is a step forward in exploring various strategies to be adopted in the rural market along with the current scenario of rural marketing, highlighting key challenges related to rural marketing. This paper presents a review of rural markets environment, problems and opportunities in India. The paper describes the challenges and strategies of rural marketing in India. Rural marketing has become the latest mantra of most corporate even MNCs are eyeing rural markets to capture the large Indian market. The rural market consist 70 percent population, twice as entire market of USA and would become bigger than total consumer market in countries like South Korea, and Canada in another 20 years. It exhibits linguistic, regional and cultural diversities and economic disparities. Increase in purchasing power fuelled lot of interest, several companies are exploring cost effective channels like HUL/ITC/Colgate/Godrej/ Nokia/BPCL.