Iodex is rubbed into the skins of animals after a hard day's work to relieve muscular pain. Does this creative idea really work in rural India? An advertiser stretches his imagination to find surprisingly different uses of Iodex. With a queer psychology of purchase and usage, Indian rural market is still a puzzle to the advertiser. The red-faced advertisers struggle to promote their products in rural India. All marketers want to expand their business in this giant market, but due to ineffective promotional strategies they have failed every time. This article makes an effort to highlight some facts about the rural market and major strategies of rural advertising.

The Indian market has expanded manifoldly in the last few decades. More companies are entering our domain and more products are being launched. The national and multinationalcompanies are engaged in cut-throat competition to bring their products to the forefront. Though these companies have been making a continuous effort to fulfill the requirements of urban consumers, at the same time, they have not realized that there is a bigger marketplace where they can try their luck. A huge market with 74% of the population, 25% of GDP and 41% of savings, has always opened the door for the marketers, but repeatedly the marketers have veered off towards virtual India (urban India). In the race of urbanization, industrialization and westernization, we are ignoring the real India (rural India). Now the major problem is how can we differentiate between real India and virtual India (rural India and urban India). The Census of India had made an effort to do the same. The census defined urban India as: "All the places that fall within the administrative limits of a municipal corporation, municipality, cantonment board, etc. or have a population of at least 5,000 and have at least 75% male working population outside the primary sector and have a population density of at least 400 per square kilometer."

Today, rural India is the real bazaar for the marketers. Big companies are adopting new marketing strategies to reach this huge and largely untapped market. In this regard, advertising plays a major role to promote their products. But the problem for the marketers is to find out a common path for this huge magnitude of the rural masses with varied social, cultural backgrounds and speaking a few hundred dialects.

Advertising Express Magazine, Rural India, Advertisers El Dorado, Rural Advertising, Municipal Corporation, National Council for Applied Economic Research, NCAER, Rural Infrastructure, Rural Industrialization, Cable and Satellite, C&S, Radio Advertising, FMCG Companies.