Brand awareness and customer preferences for FMCG products in rural market-A Study of Kurukshetra district of Haryana

The Indian rural market with its vast size offers a huge opportunity with 128 million households and the rural population is nearly three times the urban. India today has about 6.4 lakh villages. All except about 15,000, have a population below 5000. Looking at marketer defined classification, most companies in the FMCG sector would define any area with primarily agriculture based occupation and with a population of less than 20,000 as rural. Rural areas exhibit several distinctive characteristics that are different from the urban areas. Literacy levels, family structure, occupational patterns, social customs and norms, and several other features are unique to rural India. A complex set of factors influence rural consumer's behavior. Social norms, traditions, castes, and social customs have greater influence on the consumer behavior in rural areas than in urban areas. The seasonality of agricultural production influences the seasonality of rural consumers’ demand. Although rural areas offer attractive opportunities to marketers at an aggregate level, about 68 percent of these markets remain untapped mainly due to inaccessibility. It is uneconomical to access a large number of small villages with a very low population density spread over a large geographic area. Factors such as limited physical access, low density of shops, limited storage facilities, need for a large number of intermediaries in the distribution channel to reach the end customers, and low capacity of intermediaries to invest in business (investments for keeping stock, storage facilities, vehicles for distribution) make the tasks of reaching rural consumers very complex. It is in this context we need to understand the importance of alternative means of reaching rural consumers through periodic village markets (or haats), agricultural markets (mandis), and rural fairs (melas). The purpose of this study is to examine the brand awareness in rural area and to study the interest of consumers in branded products of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG).