Indian Rural Markets: Issues and Challenges for Corporates

The Indian rural market with its vast size and large demand base definitely offers huge opportunities to marketers. Rural marketing has gained prominence in the last decade. The nineties saw widespread changes in the Indian business environment. Urban markets for many consumer goods either got saturated or were badly hit by recession. A fear of competition in urban markets and huge opportunities in rural markets forced all marketing strategist to enter the rural markets.

In the modern rural market there is converging trend which may be obstacle for rural marketing process. Rural consumer behavior is converging with urban consumer behavior. Because of urban orientation, changes in socio-economic and cultural environment increase in income and education, a new trend in consumer behavior is converging in rural markets. What marketers and advertisers are nowadays worried is the way to develop a model which will influence the converging rural consumer behavior in India over a long period of time. A new trend in rural consumer behavior creates an ideal opportunity for companies to explore new rural markets and posses challenges for marketers in implementing successful marketing programs in converging rural markets. To grab the opportunities and face the challenges there is a need of changing the marketing mix and effective rural market research.

With this background this paper covers the issues and challenges in Indian rural markets, strategies for Indian Rural Markets.