I looked at my watch. It’s 1:45
pm, yet one more hour to go. I am sitting in the class of ‘Marketing in Rural
India’ where my professor is delineating various aspects of country’s rural
places and demographics. The class is discussing rural people’s disposable
income, buying behavior, socio-economic classification etc.
I wondered how astonished a village person would have been if he came to know that how extensively we tried to understand their market. Because for him the market is simply a weekly haat, a few kirana shop, few tea stalls, a couple of small medicine kiosk, few confectionery primarily sweets and few stalls of chat-pakaura. The village person wondered: What is there to discuss in it so extensively? We get everything we require and a few items which are not available, we can get it from the nearby town; straight and simple.
Is it as simple as put by the village person? Or is it complex enough to muddle our heads in all sorts of available data? I recall a quote by Aaron Levenstein- “Statistics are like bikinis; what they reveal is suggestive, what they hide is vital.”
I used to visit my ancestral village during my summer vacations when I was in school. Recently I visited my native village after four years. It is located in the Sahibganj district of Jharkhand on the bank of river Ganga. Yes, I know you are tempted to say that Ganga crosses Bihar along its width. No. It touches Jharkhand at the north eastern point and there lies my village. For those who have seen villages through the windows of trains or perceive villages to be a congested rural place in urban cities or think villages to be like those depicted in the movies directed by Aditya Chopra, then you have not got even half the picture.
The first thing that pulls me to the village is the joy of joint family; three generations living under one roof in the big house. The space from the boundary wall to the gate of the house is sufficient enough to play cricket for us cousins. And in the backside you have mango orchid. My uncle would make it a point that we all knew the names of different varieties of mangoes, which are differentiated by size, color, texture, smell and yes of course taste. Whenever there was a storm, the orchid would be full of mangoes littering on the ground. Then few poor kids from the village would volunteer to collect all and bring it to my aunt, who would in turn generously give any amount of mango they would like to carry back to their home. The kids would typically hold their frock or shirt to make it a bowl shaped and would fill it with mangoes. This process has not changed since years. Faces have changed.
This time I wanted to explore the psyche of village persons. I wanted to make friends with very poor people; in our jargon we classify them in D or E in socio-economic classification (SEC). You will get people from these clusters in cities, mostly labors, but I don’t consider them to be the true representatives of this class. The city labors are not the free self; instead they are objectified as human machines. To understand the SEC E, in context of rural marketing, I believe we need to go to the village.
When I revealed my plan to my elder cousin, he wondered what I was up to. Then he said- “You can take my car, and take a trip to entire village. Will you be able to drive in this place? You know, any time any pot bellied kid will just run across the street. That run will be a total surprise to you. And they won’t care about your horn.”
Yes this is a typical feature in villages. If any kid sees a car they try to go to where his/her mother is, no matter where she is standing. Or they try to cross the road before the car crosses it. They find it fun! Even the domestic animals like hen, duck, calf, goat etc do the same. I had a bad encounter in my approximately 100 kilometers of cumulative rural road travel experience. A hen crossed the road. Or should I say, couldn’t cross the road! I could have applied brake had I saw it. It started its run at a time when it was out of my line of sight; probably interested in putting its beak in my car’s tire. I had to pay thrice the amount to get away with it. Reason: it would have laid eggs in future which are lost now. Correct, in our jargon, we call it net present value (NPV) of future earnings! Welcome to village.
“Why don’t you take the bike instead?” my cousin asked.
But I had something different in mind. I wanted to go on foot. It will give me a real connect. I started moving towards the bank of the river. The road turns right and then it runs parallel to the shore. The road is elevated to approximately 3 meters from the shore level; probably to check the river water flooding the village in the rainy season. In the summers, the shore line is approximately 15-20 meters away from the road. I saw a few persons sitting on a ‘machaan’ and playing cards. ‘Machaan’ or bamboo deck is a flat square structure of one to two square meters made of bamboo. It is supported by again bamboo on the four side of the square structure. One side faces the road at a height of 1 meter and other side has depth of 3-4 meters. The summer evening on the shore of river was never such pleasant. The cool and humid breeze made me wonder whether it was summer!
I started talking to a person there, about the places to visit here, about their occupation etc. The primary occupation here is farming. They generally work in their small farmland or they work as farm labor to landlords. Others are tractor drivers, mechanics, fisherman and small traders. The place is almost isolated from other world. No newspaper, electricity for 2 to 3 hours a day, so no TV news. But I felt good about it; here I had nothing to worry about! It stroked me; how advertisements reach such places? It motivated me to go to a ‘kirana’ shop to see their SKU (Stock keeping units). It is not that I have never been there; but I have never bothered to see the various brands there. I forwarded towards a shop nearby. As I reached there the shopkeeper recognized me and offered me a seat. A bench outside any shop is common here. For the sake of buying I just bought a cake of soap. All the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) products present were of lower volume packs. Shampoos were in sachet only. No offer packs of soap were available (buy 3 get 1 free of kind). Biscuits ranging from price Rs 2 to Rs 20 were present. I sat there for some time. I found that people were not demanding anything specifically by the name of brands. Instead they said give me a soap or shampoo; whatever shopkeeper gave, they took it. Biscuits were demanded on the price of it. Like biscuit of Rs 5 or Rs 10 etc. Mobile recharge was also available there. I heard the first brand name ‘Vodafone’. Also the board above the store displayed the same name. So communication can penetrate at this level, so why only telecoms not FMCG, given that they have always been forerunner in advertisement. One reason can be the overall revenue is not enough to support any kind of advertisement. So who decides what will be sold here? Only answer to this is, I believe, the strength of your distribution channel and the margins provided to shopkeepers and wholesalers. There were other villagers sitting on the bench and talking about politics. I was only intermittent participant in their discussion, probably because of lack of knowledge of their local political figures and local issues. But I wanted to listen. I took a cup of tea from a nearby stall. Their conversation was mostly related to a particular person rather than on political party as a whole. It was based on core and grass-root issues which bothered them as village person. I tried to give input of some overall picture, but they were reluctant to discuss that. Macro-part of politics never surfaced. I wonder whether those super hyped campaign carried out by political party ever reach such places; the places which have almost 70% of the electorate. No wonder some of the most hyped political campaign like ‘India Shining’ fell flat on the face. Recently, Congress, who has positioned itself as pro-poor and is banking on poor’s vote bank, gives comment like “Poverty is a state of mind” and “Dalits need escape velocity of Jupiter to come out of poverty”. These geeky comments are not understood by 70% of the people and mocked by rest 30%. Anyway, my cup of tea was over. I called it a day and went home.
I stayed there for one week with a purpose to delve deep into village psyche. I made friends there. I visited the school and even took a few classes! They had a different level of contentment in their life. Marketing can be a difficult task under such environment. The basic essence of marketing is to show benefit and value proposed in the form of a product, service, experience, style etc. But if the targeted customer is content and non-aspirational, the criteria of marketing itself narrows. To add more the disposable income is also low. Probably that is the reason HUL went through the route of social benefit with its project Shakti and Khusiyon ki doli for rural marketing. Situation is very different and so is the marketing initiative. I guess, the rural India will give the marketing as a subject enough scope to evolve. Yes, a lot of things to learn in rural marketing.
"Hey, you, what do you think about the methods of communication strategy to be adopted in the rural India?” My professor asked pointing towards me. Oh yes, I am attending the class of ‘Marketing in Rural India’. I replied, “The conventional way of communication is not feasible in such places. We should instead….” The unending discussions continued.
“As per the data the penetration
of color TV in rural India is… percentage of village electrified… percentage of
household availing electricity… What does this suggest about …” And the class
debate is active with lots of data, opinions, questions and cross questions which
is well facilitated by our professor.
I wondered how astonished a village person would have been if he came to know that how extensively we tried to understand their market. Because for him the market is simply a weekly haat, a few kirana shop, few tea stalls, a couple of small medicine kiosk, few confectionery primarily sweets and few stalls of chat-pakaura. The village person wondered: What is there to discuss in it so extensively? We get everything we require and a few items which are not available, we can get it from the nearby town; straight and simple.
Is it as simple as put by the village person? Or is it complex enough to muddle our heads in all sorts of available data? I recall a quote by Aaron Levenstein- “Statistics are like bikinis; what they reveal is suggestive, what they hide is vital.”
I used to visit my ancestral village during my summer vacations when I was in school. Recently I visited my native village after four years. It is located in the Sahibganj district of Jharkhand on the bank of river Ganga. Yes, I know you are tempted to say that Ganga crosses Bihar along its width. No. It touches Jharkhand at the north eastern point and there lies my village. For those who have seen villages through the windows of trains or perceive villages to be a congested rural place in urban cities or think villages to be like those depicted in the movies directed by Aditya Chopra, then you have not got even half the picture.
The first thing that pulls me to the village is the joy of joint family; three generations living under one roof in the big house. The space from the boundary wall to the gate of the house is sufficient enough to play cricket for us cousins. And in the backside you have mango orchid. My uncle would make it a point that we all knew the names of different varieties of mangoes, which are differentiated by size, color, texture, smell and yes of course taste. Whenever there was a storm, the orchid would be full of mangoes littering on the ground. Then few poor kids from the village would volunteer to collect all and bring it to my aunt, who would in turn generously give any amount of mango they would like to carry back to their home. The kids would typically hold their frock or shirt to make it a bowl shaped and would fill it with mangoes. This process has not changed since years. Faces have changed.
This time I wanted to explore the psyche of village persons. I wanted to make friends with very poor people; in our jargon we classify them in D or E in socio-economic classification (SEC). You will get people from these clusters in cities, mostly labors, but I don’t consider them to be the true representatives of this class. The city labors are not the free self; instead they are objectified as human machines. To understand the SEC E, in context of rural marketing, I believe we need to go to the village.
When I revealed my plan to my elder cousin, he wondered what I was up to. Then he said- “You can take my car, and take a trip to entire village. Will you be able to drive in this place? You know, any time any pot bellied kid will just run across the street. That run will be a total surprise to you. And they won’t care about your horn.”
Yes this is a typical feature in villages. If any kid sees a car they try to go to where his/her mother is, no matter where she is standing. Or they try to cross the road before the car crosses it. They find it fun! Even the domestic animals like hen, duck, calf, goat etc do the same. I had a bad encounter in my approximately 100 kilometers of cumulative rural road travel experience. A hen crossed the road. Or should I say, couldn’t cross the road! I could have applied brake had I saw it. It started its run at a time when it was out of my line of sight; probably interested in putting its beak in my car’s tire. I had to pay thrice the amount to get away with it. Reason: it would have laid eggs in future which are lost now. Correct, in our jargon, we call it net present value (NPV) of future earnings! Welcome to village.
“Why don’t you take the bike instead?” my cousin asked.
But I had something different in mind. I wanted to go on foot. It will give me a real connect. I started moving towards the bank of the river. The road turns right and then it runs parallel to the shore. The road is elevated to approximately 3 meters from the shore level; probably to check the river water flooding the village in the rainy season. In the summers, the shore line is approximately 15-20 meters away from the road. I saw a few persons sitting on a ‘machaan’ and playing cards. ‘Machaan’ or bamboo deck is a flat square structure of one to two square meters made of bamboo. It is supported by again bamboo on the four side of the square structure. One side faces the road at a height of 1 meter and other side has depth of 3-4 meters. The summer evening on the shore of river was never such pleasant. The cool and humid breeze made me wonder whether it was summer!
I started talking to a person there, about the places to visit here, about their occupation etc. The primary occupation here is farming. They generally work in their small farmland or they work as farm labor to landlords. Others are tractor drivers, mechanics, fisherman and small traders. The place is almost isolated from other world. No newspaper, electricity for 2 to 3 hours a day, so no TV news. But I felt good about it; here I had nothing to worry about! It stroked me; how advertisements reach such places? It motivated me to go to a ‘kirana’ shop to see their SKU (Stock keeping units). It is not that I have never been there; but I have never bothered to see the various brands there. I forwarded towards a shop nearby. As I reached there the shopkeeper recognized me and offered me a seat. A bench outside any shop is common here. For the sake of buying I just bought a cake of soap. All the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) products present were of lower volume packs. Shampoos were in sachet only. No offer packs of soap were available (buy 3 get 1 free of kind). Biscuits ranging from price Rs 2 to Rs 20 were present. I sat there for some time. I found that people were not demanding anything specifically by the name of brands. Instead they said give me a soap or shampoo; whatever shopkeeper gave, they took it. Biscuits were demanded on the price of it. Like biscuit of Rs 5 or Rs 10 etc. Mobile recharge was also available there. I heard the first brand name ‘Vodafone’. Also the board above the store displayed the same name. So communication can penetrate at this level, so why only telecoms not FMCG, given that they have always been forerunner in advertisement. One reason can be the overall revenue is not enough to support any kind of advertisement. So who decides what will be sold here? Only answer to this is, I believe, the strength of your distribution channel and the margins provided to shopkeepers and wholesalers. There were other villagers sitting on the bench and talking about politics. I was only intermittent participant in their discussion, probably because of lack of knowledge of their local political figures and local issues. But I wanted to listen. I took a cup of tea from a nearby stall. Their conversation was mostly related to a particular person rather than on political party as a whole. It was based on core and grass-root issues which bothered them as village person. I tried to give input of some overall picture, but they were reluctant to discuss that. Macro-part of politics never surfaced. I wonder whether those super hyped campaign carried out by political party ever reach such places; the places which have almost 70% of the electorate. No wonder some of the most hyped political campaign like ‘India Shining’ fell flat on the face. Recently, Congress, who has positioned itself as pro-poor and is banking on poor’s vote bank, gives comment like “Poverty is a state of mind” and “Dalits need escape velocity of Jupiter to come out of poverty”. These geeky comments are not understood by 70% of the people and mocked by rest 30%. Anyway, my cup of tea was over. I called it a day and went home.
I stayed there for one week with a purpose to delve deep into village psyche. I made friends there. I visited the school and even took a few classes! They had a different level of contentment in their life. Marketing can be a difficult task under such environment. The basic essence of marketing is to show benefit and value proposed in the form of a product, service, experience, style etc. But if the targeted customer is content and non-aspirational, the criteria of marketing itself narrows. To add more the disposable income is also low. Probably that is the reason HUL went through the route of social benefit with its project Shakti and Khusiyon ki doli for rural marketing. Situation is very different and so is the marketing initiative. I guess, the rural India will give the marketing as a subject enough scope to evolve. Yes, a lot of things to learn in rural marketing.
"Hey, you, what do you think about the methods of communication strategy to be adopted in the rural India?” My professor asked pointing towards me. Oh yes, I am attending the class of ‘Marketing in Rural India’. I replied, “The conventional way of communication is not feasible in such places. We should instead….” The unending discussions continued.
