Competitive strategies of corporates in rural markets: issues & challenges

Thirteen years into the post millennium era, rural India is no longer viewed as a burden, either to the economy or the marketer, rather; it is seen as a new avenue for penetrating and widening the horizon of marketing activity. Ever since the last two decades, there has been a paradigm shift in the marketers approach to avenues of profit generation and market penetration. Marketers have shifted their gaze to the rural customer as the longstanding romance between marketers and their urban customers had reached a stagnant state. They have since been wooing the Indian Rural Market in a win-win success story. The prime reason for this switch being cut throat competition in urban markets and the huge potential in rural markets.

Convergence seems to be the keyword. The behaviour of the rural consumer is converging with that of their urban counterparts. Due to the impact of urban orientation; changes in socio-economic and cultural environment; increase in the average income earned; slow but steady rise in the literacy level; we are witness to the convergence of urban consumer behavior in rural markets but not without competition. Therefore, the major concern faced by the corporates is to develop outcome based competitive strategies to surpass their competitors. While rural markets create an ideal opportunity for the corporates to increase profits, it does pose challenges for marketers in implementing strategies successfully and converging rural markets with the urban markets.

The focus of research is to tap the untapped markets of rural India by developing competitive strategies and exploring the vast potential existing beyond the so-called boundaries of civilization to stay ahead of competition; to identify the issues and challenges of shifting from urban markets to rural markets; it certainly calls for a dire need of revisiting the existing marketing strategies.