Rural VS Urban Marketing And Advertising

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Abstract

From the exacting promoting viewpoint, the business division structure in India is dichotomous having natural and urban markets. Anyway various don’t concur with this point of view as they battle that purchaser all around is a client and thus their requirements, desires, feelings moreover attitude will similarly be the equivalent. However, the condition is with the end goal that, there must be independent elevating techniques to be especially made to suit the nation’s provincial and urban business direct.

Presently, provincial markets have developed as significant piece of worldwide market which is difficult to disregard. The negative impact of all the late money related emergency with respect to urban India has been more than balance by engaging execution in country India. To investigate and fathom country business area is huge for any advertisers today. Rustic business is like goldmine with package of difficulties. This needs to design a sufficiently sketched out strategy to feel the beat of the nation customers and to deal with the mysterious country business. Various associations go to provincial markets, still to make benefit, not to direct them or help or make rustic purchasers. The nation advertisers must think provincial for long stretch achievement as opposed to transient advantage. In this setting this paper features the distinctions in provincial and urban promoting methodologies to be executed by various organizations marketing strategies to be implemented by different companies.

Introduction

Country India represents around 68% of the all out Indian populace. It additionally represents 56% of the national salary, 64% of the all out consumption and 33% of the all out national reserve funds. Country economy has moved from agribusiness centered to more non-horticultural exercises. This has brought about expanding salary levels and rising training. Likewise, with immersing urban markets and rising pay levels, country India presents an immense open door for the organizations to grow their market. This market is anticipated to give a chance of US $100 billion in the following fifteen years for retail spending.3 These figures expressed present a shrewd picture for the advertisers to look to the provincial market to build their item deals. Dissimilar to the urban market which is all around served and serious, the provincial market is inadequately served and uncompetitive with not very many players in this market. This reality may appear to be worthwhile for the organizations to expand its entrance into the provincial market however just organizations which comprehend the changing desires and developing needs of the different sections of country purchasers will make the cut or rather hit the dead center.

Urban and provincial networks have truly had various socioeconomics, interests and openings. While the correspondences blast of the late twentieth century, most remarkably the approach of the Internet, is obscuring the lines to some degree, there are as yet expansive contrasts. These distinctions regularly require shifted showcasing techniques for organizations wishing to offer to the two markets.

Socioeconomics

The socioeconomics of provincial India is changing a piece as of late. Some hotel or diversion regions have seen a flood of new inhabitants whose preferences and segment profiles might be very not quite the same as their neighbors’ taste. In any case, provincial occupants despite everything will in general be more homogenous than their urban partners and will in general offer social and strict qualities. They are bound to be family with generally low salary and will in general get less cash-flow by and large. A promotion crusade focused on a country market would consequently essentially be not quite the same as one focused on a urban market. A country vehicle sales center, for instance, may pressure reasonableness and a believed brand over green innovation or new structure highlights, which may have more intrigue at a urban business.

Access

Rustic territories are far off from downtown areas; in this way, abhor the equivalent simple access to significant shopping settings that city occupants appreciate. A promoting plan focusing on rustic customers may depend on Internet deals or an organization with stores that are as of now serving the requirements of far off areas. Its message would be more outlandish isolated into various forms for various buyer subgroups. An advertising effort focused on urban buyers may should be broken into various parts to speak to the numerous differing bunches inside the promoting zone. It would likewise should be progressively strange or forceful to stand apart from the ocean of advertisements vieing for urban shoppers’ consideration

Literature Review

Research paper by Rithvika (Publishing India group, 2018) says that there are basically 4 “A’s” apart from 4 “P’s” that contribute to the rural marketing strategies. She mentioned acceptability, affordability, availability and awareness as the 4 key factors in the rural market. As the focus of this paper is on rural market, she emphasised on the affordability because of the lower family income in the rural areas. In the starting of the paper, other factors are also mentioned such as literacy level, which indicates that literacy level in rural areas is close to 69% as compared to 85% in the urban market due to which companies have to make them aware of the capability and functions of the product or service which they intend to sell. She also mentioned the importance of other factors such as their source of income which is mainly agricultural, communication and media, brand awareness, unexploited and untapped rural markets due to lack of small distribution channels and adoption of new brands.

In the paper by Mr. Prakash (Publishing India Group, 2017), research is done on effect of advertisements on consumers in rural market. It is depicted that the very goal of all advertisements is to influence peoples’ attitudes and buying behaviour and to succeed in marketing, the advertisers need to understand what makes people behave the way they do. Advertisements effectively use the information and knowledge gained from the behavioural sciences to motivate, modify or reinforce consumer perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. To accomplish this, advertising people should be conscious of and monitor peoples’ attitude, values, likes and dislikes, habits and fears. It is shown through statistics that the price is the main factor in the rural market and affects the psychology of a rural consume the most.

Dr. Anubhuti Gupta through her research paper (IJMR, 2017), said that the rural market is growing in India in recent times due to several factors such as increase in population in rural areas which ultimately leads to rise in demand, inflow of foreign made goods in rural India, increase in awareness and literacy rate in India etc. major problems related to marketing in rural areas are also shown which include transportation and warehousing problems, channel management and sales plus workforce management. Various steps are also mentioned to boost the rural marketing which include some steps that are ought to be taken by the government such as improving the warehousing by not depending on private companies, communication and roads in rural areas.

Lidia Alexa through her research paper (Lidia, 2010) tries to explain the effect of globalization on urban marketing though she starts with the concept of destination marketing. She says that urban marketing is the alignment of the urban politics to the requirements of the local economic stakeholders and to the hopes and expectations of those operating outside of it. Summing up she mentioned urban marketing is a local response to the global economic and technological changes and the best practice models published in the marketing literature confirm certain trends which will begin to be replied more often by different cities.

Pramod Patil shows a comparative study of rural and urban population in his paper (Pramod, February 2017). He shows the trend of rise in urban and rural population through help of census conducted by government of India, expenditure comparison of rural and urban households. He stated that the changing environment is reducing gap between Indian rural and urban consumers but still a noticeable difference exists between socio-economic and cultural environment of both regions resulting in change in rural and urban consumers’ behaviour. A care should be taken by policy makers while designing marketing strategies for these regions.

Whereas Dr. Sanjay Aswale in his paper (Sanjay, 2013) has shown through statistics that the behaviour of rural and urban consumer is somewhat same by conducting a survey. He states that there is a wide opportunity for companies as there is not much deviation in the consumers behaviour in the rural areas and majority of the rural market is untapped and untouched by some giant companies.

Data Interpretation and Analysis

• Literacy trend in rural and urban India

As we can see in the above mentioned, the improvement of literacy rate of rural India is more than 2 times of the urban population. The rural urban literacy gap which was 21.2 percentage points in 2001, has come down to 16.1 percentage points in 2011.

Since there is no data available for the recent past as census is yet to happen in 2021, it can be concluded from the above data that the literacy rate of rural India is rising rapidly. There may come a time when literacy rate of rural India becomes equal to that of urban India or may even rise above.

This rise in above literacy rate of the rural consumer may will surely make it easier for the companies to spread their network as a major obstacle for the companies is the need to spread awareness about their product or service in the rural consumers’ mind. In general, companies apply a different market strategy to cover all sectors of the population which is hectic due to diverse population of India. They are ought to invest more time and resources in marketing in rural areas but if the literacy rate of rural regions will rise at a rapid rate, there will be no need of different strategies to make consumer aware thus the network of companies will spread to even remote locations

• Occupation

There is much difference in occupation pattern in rural and urban region. In urban region, occupation is diverse, and ranging from professionals, skilled, semi-skilled to unskilled workers. Specialization is achieved through higher education, training and skill development (The MAX-NCAER Indian Financial Protection Survey, 2008)

In rural region, predominant occupation is agriculture but now people are shifting to non-traditional occupations like shop/trade, skilled work, and salaried job. Educational gradation in rural region is rapidly improving with the arrival of technology to even remote areas. The agricultural sector is severely contracting both in terms of its output and employment shares. The big expansion has occurred in the service sector. The industrial sector has also expanded but at a far lower pace. The expansion in blue-collar occupations jobs (primarily production and service workers) in rural areas is at a significantly faster rate than the corresponding expansion of blue-collar occupations in urban areas.

Occupation also plays a role in destination marketing strategies as occupation depicts the financial capability of a household. Thus, it affects the pricing of the goods and services in different areas. However, it is difficult for companies to set a different price for different household. Rise in the skilled works and salaries jobs in rural India reflect the improvement in financial state of rural consumers thus companies can have a firm hold on the rural market and there is also a possibility of exploring the untapped markets.

• Expenditure

The spending can be classified in two categories that are necessities and discretionary goods. Necessities include basic amenities like food, clothes and shelter and discretionary expenses are rest of expenses. Trends in share of consumption on these two broad categories have followed opposite directions; with discretionary spending gradually getting more prominence in the consumption basket. The rural consumption basket is also changing and is slowly converging towards the urban consumption basket. According to NSSO data, the expenditure of rural consumer on non-food items has increased by 14.6% against 16% increase of urban consumer for the period 1993-94 to 2011-12. Rural consumers are buying more premium health, hygiene, personal grooming, packaged foods and convenience consumer packaged products, reflecting aspirations towards changes in lifestyle. (National Sample Survey Office 2011-12)

• Advertising Strategies

Data from Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) showed that digital ad expenditure climbed 26% last year to reach Rs 13,683 crore. A DAN report also maintained that digital advertising will likely maintain a 27% rate of growth in 2020.

Digital Advertising mainly includes television and internet advertising. In spite of rise of modernization in India, there are still many remote areas where tele-facilities like television and internet are not available. Knowing this many companies invest a lot in digital advertising which indicates either their lack of interest in rural markets or incapability to reach those markets.

Advertising is the key factor of any marketing strategy and lack of composure in advertising skills may cause downfall of the company. Though companies cannot do much about it until government boosts the impact of digitalization on remote areas but they can surely spread their network of advertising to different modes of advertising like magazines and newspapers.

The size of rural community is smaller, homogeneous and has less differentiation which results in the system of interaction as personal and long term. The decision making is mostly collective and depends upon opinion of influencers such as retailers, village leaders, teachers, experts etc. Rural society is culture bound therefore care should be taken while designing marketing communication programs and other marketing strategies. Literacy level is one of the major obstacle in rural region. This results in presence of much less products in rural market. In rural region 4 A’s are more important i.e. affordability, acceptability, availability and awareness whereas on the other hand Urban community is larger in size, heterogeneous and has more social differentiation resulting in impersonal, causal relations. The decision making is mostly individual and independent. Urban population is dense and concentrated, also infrastructure facility is excellent in urban area. Rural population is scattered and most of them living in medium and small sized villages with poor infrastructure facility whereas majority of urban population lives in large size cities. As a result of all these aspects the cost of serving consumer is higher in rural than urban region. Migration is resulting in increase in urban population but at the same time this migrated rural population is sending money to their relatives living in rural region thus increasing the purchasing power of rural consumer. It is also adopting urban lifestyle and exposing their relatives in rural region for this lifestyle.

Conclusion

It is pretty evident from the analysed data that the rural sector is constantly thriving towards modernization thus leading paths to industrial revolution. Marketing is the “make or break” aspect of any company. Due to diversification of such a vast population of India, there are still several barriers in applying the marketing strategies to the remote areas.

Government has a major role to play in the upliftment of the rural sector. Development of facilities like transport, roads, warehousing facilities are somewhere lacking in today’s scenario. There are several schemes and perks for MSMEs and Small Scale Industries but are not properly enforced thus, small business’ are unable to thrive or even survive in the economy. Though government has taken a major step in form of the “Make in India” campaign which provides more opportunities for the rural population which ultimately leads to upliftment of rural economy as well.

In United States of America, a farmer lives a luxurious lifestyle with several amenities which is totally opposite of the condition of farmers in India which is quite miserable and only government of India can help the farmers which covers more than half of the rural population.

There are also several loopholes in the marketing strategies of Indian companies majorly due to vast and different scenarios. Hopefully in the future there will be no need of different strategies for different regions due to Indian Modernization.

References

Website References

https://smallbusiness.chron.com
https://www.researchgate.net
http://www.academia.edu
https://papers.ssrn.com
https://censusindia.gov.in
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com

Papers References

Pramod Patil (2017) – “Rural and Consumer of India” Available on : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316786211
Lidia Alexa(2010) – “Urban Marketing and its Impact on competition between Cities” Available on : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46524920
Prakash H.S. and Mustiary Begum (2017)– “An Effect of Selected Media’s Advertisements on Consumers in Rural Market: A Study with Reference to Shivamogga District”
Dr. Anubhuti Gupta (June, 2017)- “Recent trends in rural market in India”
Rithvikaa Kripanithi and Anitha Ramachander (2017) – “ 4 ‘A’s The Key Drivers of Rural Economy

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