Back to villages

If you are in Gurdaspur, make sure you take a stroll down the Western Union Chowk. For nowhere else in the world would you find a street named after the world’s largest cross-border remittances company.

This only proves how great is the brand recall for Western Union in this small  town in Punjab. This also shows how big corporates have moved beyond the archetypal rural marketing tools like small unit sachets, mom-and-pop stores or partnership with NGOs for tapping at the bottom of the pyramid.

More and more companies are beginning to think of the next best way to tap 720 million customers spread across the country’s hinterland.

According to Pradeep Kashyap, CEO of MART, a leading rural consultancy firm, organisations need to adopt the “reverse innovation” strategy and also work on new price paradigms.

A reverse innovation simply means any innovation that’s likely to be adopted first in the developing areas. Increasingly, we see companies developing products in smaller towns and villages and then distribute nationally.

Kashyap, who is known as the father of rural marketing in India, is also the brain behind a large number of rural marketing initiatives by leading corporates.  He said there is a lot to be done by corporates who have been slow on capturing the rural heartland. “Except for commendable programmes like ITC’s e-choupal and HUL’s Project Shakti, most rural marketing initiatives have been an extension to what has been offered in the urban areas,” he added.

“As part of reverse innovation, corporates have to innovate on products, which should be designed jointly with the rural communities. Moreover, a new price performance paradigm has to be worked out, which can deliver 75% performance at 25% of the price. Rural people use core benefit of the brand. There is also a need to empower officials at the local level,” Kashyap said.

“Corporates need to be sensitised more on rural markets as there is a huge potential across sectors including health, construction, food processing, insurance and others. Companies need to refocus to meet the demands of the rural sector,” he added.

Nazeeb Arif, vice-president, ITC, said, “E-choupal today is the world’s largest rural digital infrastructure covering 40,000 villages and benefiting 4 million farmers. The e-choupal network provides customised extension services that ensure that farmers get higher productivity and that they are able to meet climatic challenges. The marketing linkages, provided through e-choupal is to get the best prices and not be at the mercy of the exploitative intermediaries. This has resulted in increasing the incomes of the farmers.”

According to Kashyap, MART is currently in the process of sensitising rural marketing of Godrej. “We have done a lot of interesting programmes with HUL, Airtel, Escorts apart from Intel, Honeywell, Shell and Microsoft. We would soon be working with Dupont on their agri-business and energy in rural areas. We will also working with GE on their health delivery systems,” he said.

Mukul Kandwal, chief business manager-Project Kisan, Exide Industries, believes rural market is different. “Hence we came up with a hub-n-spoke model as part of Project Kisan initiative to reach out to 14 states and cover over 34,000 villages. This initiative helped us grow rural sales by almost 25%. This was mainly on account of tractor replacement batteries that we supply,” he said. Exide has a 14% market share of the rural market.

Rajesh Mehta, director marketing, south and south east Asia, Western Union, said, “Building a rural brand is not easy. Today 60% of our India revenues come from the rural segment”.