Rural marketing potential in India -Challenges & strategies

Fast pace of technology advanced every sphere of social, economic, political cultural life, produce, reduce costs, distribute, and expect higher profits. The focus is on tapping the rural markets. Urban markets have saturated lied to look rural markets. This paper presents a review of rural markets? environment, Problems and strategies in India. Rural marketing has become the latest mantra of most corporate even MNCs are eyeing rural markets to capture the large Indian market. The rural market consist 70 percent population, twice as entire market of USA and would become bigger than total consumer market in countries like South Korea, and Canada in another 20 years. Using primary and secondary data collected from various market segments. It exhibits linguistic, regional and cultural diversities and economic disparities. Increase in purchasing power fueled lot of interest, several companies are exploring cost effective channels like HUL/ITC/Colgate/Godrej/Nokia/BPCL.

The paper describes the challenges and strategies of rural marketing in India. The rural market in Indian economy can be classified under two broad categories. These are the market for consumer goods that comprise of both durable and non-durable goods and the market for agricultural inputs. In recent years, rural markets have acquired importance, as the overall growth of the economy has resulted into considerable increase in the purchasing power of the rural people and preferences of rural people are also getting changed. So, every marketing player is keen to invest in rural markets. Though there is huge potential and substantial growth opportunities in the rural markets, yet there are some challenges too, which caused hurdles in tapping rural markets. This study is a step forward in exploring various strategies to be adopted in the rural market along with the current scenario of rural marketing, highlighting key challenges related to rural marketing