To say that the real India lies in the small towns and cities, and more than 70% live in villages would be a simplistic and all too naïve beginning to this write up. Nevertheless, the importance of building rural brands needs to be reassessed here and we will discuss its importance before we go on to the factors, which need to be taken special cognizance of when looking at brand building in the Indian rural context.
First let's tackle the definition of rural. Different companies define rural differently. While to HLL, a rural market would be "towns with a population of 5,000", for LG or for Samsung the definition would probably be any agglomerate of people with a population of less than 1 lakh!
In this article, when we talk about rural, we are not taking into consideration the top 80 cities of India which houses around 140 million people and accounts for only 14% of India's population. Towns with a population between 2 to 5 lakh (about 129 in number) would qualify as Semi-urban Grade 1, 265 towns with population between 1 to 2 lakh as Semi-urban Grade 2 and all towns and villages between 50 to 1 lakh, 498 in number as Semi-urban Grade 3. Strictly speaking, the rural consumer referred to here would be residing in a settlement of about 5,000 people or less with no municipality block, purchasing major durables from the nearest urban center, visiting haats and mandis for checking out latest products etc.
The rural consumer is very young and the young drive the consumption trends in these areas. This is a trend which has been picked up by many corporates including HLL, Coke, CavinCare, Marico and LG. Hence, they do not hesitate to target products with some basic customer value like Fair & Lovely, Fairever, Chik, Clinic Plus, Coke and Sunfill to the rural consumer. |
