Being an independent marketing professional and keen researcher in the area of rural marketing often heard the line "there is a huge potential lies in the rural market", and read many case studies about successful penetration done by many national and international companies in rural markets. Yes it is true in last 15 years importance of rural market grew manifolds and thanks to Shri Pradeep Kashyap and many more such rural marketing stalwarts for their arduous efforts but still there is a missing link to utilize the potential of rural marketing.
In 1988 Professor Mithileshwar Jha for the first time introduces a holistic view in his article Rural Marketing Some Conceptual Issues. It indicated a flow of marketing opportunities lies in both urban and rural market as follows:
Rural to Rural (Local products like milk, pottery etc. exchanging products and services within rural markets)
Rural to Urban (Unorganized business from rural areas like handicraft and agriculture output selling in urban markets)
Urban to Rural (Organized business like FMCG, Consumer goods, agri-inputs etc. providing their products and services in rural markets)
In last 15-20 years many companies focused on the rural markets and few got marginal success and very few still penetrating potential lies in rural market. Not a single company thought of utilizing the potential lies for rural produces mainly handicraft and handloom in the urban and overseas markets. The biggest potential is for agricultural produces but that is not my focus area because of no expertise in it. After agricultural the most important sector is handloom and handicraft sector which provides employment to more than 1 crore rural population in India. There is a huge potential lies in marketing of such products which can be explored by organized players along with penetrating the rural markets with their existing offerings. The value chain analysis would be optimized if explored in a right way.
Rann Utsav is one of such initiative to promote the rural product and services through an event marketing among the target customer segment. FabIndia is also such an initiative marketing handicrafts produced by rural craftsmen of India in urban and overseas markets through a chain of retail stores.
It does not only increase the new business opportunities for organized players but also improve the pockets of rural population to purchase their offerings at the same time. e-Chaupal initiative of ITC has done it in some way but their focus was on particular crop and limited to the few rural areas only.
What I can say about rural marketing is that it is not all selling urban produces in rural market but vice versa too. In the last but not the least Future lies with those who are not seeing rural as customers but also as producers.
