Rural marketing in India: Opportunities and challenges

Businesses in India are now more confident than ever about the growth of the country's rural consumer markets. On account of the green revolution in India, the rural areas are consuming a large quantity of industrial and urban manufactured products. In this context, a special marketing strategy, namely, rural marketing has taken shape. With urban markets getting saturated for several categories of consumer goods and with rising rural incomes, marketing executives are fanning out and discovering the strengths of the large rural markets as they try to enlarge their markets. Companies are coming up with new technology and they are properly communicating it to the customer. The perception of the Indian about the desired product is changing. Now they know the difference between the products and the utilities derived out of it. Marketers and manufactures are increasingly aware of the burgeoning purchasing power, vast size and demand of the consumers. Efforts are now on to understand the attitude of rural consumers. This paper tries to understand what rural markets are? The challenges faced by the companies and opportunities available to them including potential of the rural market.