Beyond The WallHow has life and marketing transformed for finance, auto and FMCG companies as they negotiate the rutted roads and narrow bylanes of rural India? And how has the consumer changed? Read on to find out

Finance While FMCGs, telecom operators and auto makers have their own laundry list of challenges with ru-ral markets, their jobs are a walk in the park compared to financial in-stitutions. Even before they get down to the task of building brands and preference, pretty much every FI is in the category creation mode. Quite naturally, a sudden shift from relying on the local moneylender for a loan to being offered several flavours and pack sizes of insur-ance cannot be easy for a consumer. Nor can it happen overnight.

Helping things along though is a commitment from the central gov-ernment to bring these services to rural markets. Anisha Motwani, director and CMO, Max Life Insur-ance observes, “In the last few months, over 115 million new zero balance bank accounts have been opened to bring in a larger chunk of the population under the ambit of the financial services.”

One of the first lessons banks venturing into this area learn is the need for physical infrastruc-ture. While visits to banks have dropped precipitously in urban ar-eas thanks to ATMs, internet and mobile banking, according to Mo-hit Ganju SVP - marketing & com-munication, IndusInd Bank,

Ravi Balakrishnan and Delshad Irani

When we started work on the Rural Marketing special issue, we were de-termined to keep the cover clear of

the following: Sights of endless farmlands dotted with commer-cial signs. Young boys sporting Chulbul Pandey goggles, jeans and ‘Ed Hardly’ tees knocking back some cola, neat. The Missus chatting with her BFF in the next village on her personal cell phone and the hubby checking crop prices later on the same device. The whole family including dadi and barefoot kids with 1000-watt smiles huddled around a laptop. Sadhus in deep meditation in the shadow of a giant billboard, and

more such village-y scenes, basi-cally. Obviously, we didn’t suc-cumb to the temptation (for the cover at least). Because there’s more to rural marketing than wall art, mukhiyas and vans equipped with loudspeakers. As complex as the rural Indian mar-ket may be, with god knows how many thousands of towns and villages with their own distinct cultures and traditions, it is not beyond comprehension. That is if one bothers to venture beyond the wall and some old misappre-hensions. This issue of Brand

Equity attempts to break those very myths to present a very real picture of the changing needs and aspirations of consumers and challenges and opportuni-ties of marketing to rural India today. To start things off, we have a list of some important lessons marketers, both green and sea-soned, ought to learn before go-ing rural. These critical lessons come straight from the market-ers who’ve managed, to a commendable extent, to crack rural in their respective catego-ries. So keep this issue handy and use it as a how-to guide to knock down some walls before the next road trip.

“Banks need to create physical (brick & mortar) infrastructure, invest in managing cash and re-cruit/ retain competent employees willing to work in these remote lo-cations, engage with reliable busi-ness-correspondents and ensure high levels of service.”

The other key lesson is tailoring the offering to make it work harder. Volatile income patterns make fi-nancial discipline a difficult task for rural populations. Motwani points out, “Simplicity of product design is another key requirement to attract rural population to the life insurance sector.” That and cus-tomised products like tractor loans.

Financial service advertising in urban areas makes a fair number of assumptions about the people it’s talking to. Which means these ads are likely to yield diminishing returns when presented to a rural consumer. Ajay Kakar, CMO – fi-nancial services, Aditya Birla Group, says, “The messaging cues used in their communication are heavily skewed towards urban au-diences; their lifestyle, aspira-tions, behaviour and practices. For a rural audience, these messages are like pouring water over a duck’s back.”

Into The... Continued on Pg2Marketing in rural areas of the country helps erode a lot of biases from your experience in urban India

SAMEER SATPATHYCMO, MARICO

Basically, if we need something, we find a way to make it available to us. That’s the beauty of this country — its entrepreneurial ability. That’s one reason India will never be good at football — You give an Indian a corner and he’ll set up a shop there

HARIT NAGPALMD & CEO, TATA SKY

THE ECONOMIC TIMES, MARCH 18-24, 2015

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Beyond The... continued from page1

He recalls that the iconic image on a Lifebuoy pack — a man holding a tro-phy in his hand — could not be parsed

by the rural audience. “It was seen as a mugga”, says Kakar, “Similarly, while urban India may look at housing as a lifestyle statement, it was an eye open-er for me, when during a recent market

visit I heard a man living in a modest structure, at best described as a ‘shan-ty’, speak of his belief that for him his house is like the ‘Mysore Palace.’”

The communication approach is

therefore completely different. In-dusInd relies on audio-visual cam-paigns in the vernacular language and group meetings as opposed to dis-tributng pamphlets. Says Ganju, “En-tertainment (like puppet show/ folk dance), free medical camps or promot-ing a beneficial government pro-gramme are one of the best ways to connect with them.” During haats and at religious centres, the bank tries to make the audience aware of govern-ment sponsored schemes like the Prad-han Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and the Kisan Credit Card. Highlights of Axis Bank’s three year old campaign in-clude using local entertainment dance and drama forms like Jhumar in Pun-jab or Bhavai in Gujarat; slipping in banking information on the back of Krishi Pragatishala, an agri expert programme and finally comic books published in multiple languages.

AutoThe financial crisis of

2008 brought a tremen-dous amount of un-certainty in its wake, but RS Kalsi, execu-

tive director – market-ing and sales, Maruti

Suzuki remembers it dif-ferently. Even as he fretted about the implications for Maruti (he was head – sales at the time), a dealer from a semi-urban area told him, “Sir, the re-cession is only for the people who watch business channels and read pink newspapers. In the rural econo-my, we have good crops, good prices and there is no recession here.” On hindsight, Kalsi believes, “This was the inflexion point for us to focus on rural markets.”

One of the first lessons driven home forcefully was that power dressing was better left to urban areas. On a visit to Asia’s largest mandi at Gondal, Guja-rat, Kalsi found himself being given a wide berth by farmers and traders since he was wearing a suit and a tie. He realised that even at the store level, an English speaking tie and blazer wearing salesman was intimidating to his rustic customer. And so Maruti put together a special team of RDSEs or resident dealer sales executives; sons of the soil who spoke the local lan-guage. They staff Maruti’s emerging market outlets and the company claims to have recruited nearly 10,000 local youth. Kalsi admits, “They may not be slick language masters but what’s important is they strike a good chord with the local community.” The result: encouraging sales. Rural mar-kets are up 26% as of February 2015 and account for 34% of the company’s annual sales. Kalsi says with a meas-ure of pride, “We have been able to reach even the smallest villages — to-day more than 7% of MSIL sales are from villages with less than 200 house-holds.”

In a report on rural markets, Ra-ghuram Devarakonda, managing di-rector, sales and customer services practice, Accenture Strategy, suggests, “The first step is to identify and profile the right consumers who may have the means to buy products and services that are being offered.” Deftly dodging the expense involved in scattershot ru-ral marketing, MSIL identifies periods of high cash availability and ap-proaches its audience when they are in the mood to buy. It goes after mango farmers from Malihabad, orange growers near Nagpur, turmeric grow-ers in Erode (Tamil Nadu) and so on.

The other big concern is of course service and after sales support. Maruti deploys 1,500 mobile support vans. The after sales network is a key communi-cation point at road shows and is often highlighted by a model customer from the village.

Even if communication originally created for urban markets is being used in rural, brands need to localise to the extent possible, suggests Vivek Nayer, chief marketing officer – auto-motive division, Mahindra and Mahin-dra. Communication for Mahindra’s SUVs is translated into eight languag-es and runs across 30 regional chan-nels and publications. Even the hel-plines are localised.

Another key learning, which is a luxury only a vastly diversified con-glomerate like Mahindra can afford is to leverage the power of many group companies while heading to the hin-terlands. At the Mahindra Gramin Ma-hotsavs, fairs put together by the com-pany, and at haats, everything from the finance business to the agri business to SUVs and tractors can be demoed or discussed under a single roof.

The company is tailoring its offer-ing acknowledging the fact that even for the rural consumer, value is not synonymous with the lowest price. As Ravindra Shahane, VP- marketing, farm equipment puts it,“The consum-er is highly trial oriented. The im-provement in yield weighs heavily on his mind. ‘Kitna deta hai?’ has changed to ‘how well does it do the job?’”

FMCGThey buy soaps off their

mobile phones. And then pose with their newly acquired swag and post the pictures on WhatsApp in the

hopes of landing a goody bag. No, we are not

talking about self and selfie-obsessed urban millennials but rural consum-ers who may or may not be millennials. It’s one of the many signs of change that Amit Sarda, managing director, Soulflower sees among his rural clien-tele. Not bad at all for a bunch who were not so long ago reached only by highly patronising wall paintings and live events with copious amounts of over-explanation.

Not that wall paintings or events are dead or dying (or have stopped being patronising). But FMCG marketers to-day are finding new ways to reach out to a consumer who has changed sig-

nificantly over the years. While the exposure of the rural consumer to me-dia may not be as consistent or fre-quent as it is with her urban counter-part, pretty much every marketer we spoke to tells us she has the same aspi-rations and frequently, the same brands on the ‘want’ list. This is appar-ent in Britannia finding takers for even its premium biscuits like Jim-Jam and Bourbon provided they show up at the accessible price point of `5. Sunil Taldar, director – sales at Monde-lez India, who admits to being a late entrant to the rural game elaborates, “There’s a huge divide between what we’re trying to sell and what the con-sumer expects. We try to push our low-priced SKUs in rural areas but turns out the consumer is fully aware of our brand, its portfolio; and is willing to spend money on high-end products provided they reach them.” Brands are finding ways to get across and foresee e-commerce and m-commerce with de-livery via the Indian postal service be-ing a way of getting around setting up expensive distribution networks.

Of course, given the non-homogene-ity of rural markets, what applies for one part of the country or one set of consumers may not at all be relevant a few thousand kilometres down the road. And yet the business potential has marketers excited. “According to a Nielsen study, there are approximately 6.2 lakh villages in India. And out of those, 65,000 deliver the potential of 50% of business from rural markets. That’s 10% giving the value of 50%. The learning for us is that even if we focus on 10% of the villages in the country, we’re home as far as success in rural is concerned. So, we’ve chosen 312 districts, called the high potential markets, and it’s imperative for us to concentrate only on those for now,” ad-mits George Angelo, executive direc-tor (sales), Dabur India. According to Sameer Satpathy, CMO at Marico: “Marketing in rural areas of the coun-try helps erode a lot of biases from your experience in urban India. For instance, the concept of a Sunday doesn’t exist in most rural markets. The fields still need to be watered and your cow still needs to be milked. This teaches you a different way of plan-ning for these markets.” It also in-volves a debunking of other myths such as the persistent one about there being no kirana stores. Maybe not the way most urban people recognise them but they certainly exist. Harit Nagpal, MD and CEO, Tata Sky, recalls, “The deeper you go, you realise that every fourth household has setup a small kirana shop at the back of his house where he keeps two to three pieces of everyday consumption items. Every second week, he cycles to the closest town to buy these items. Basically, if we need something, we find a way to make it available to us. That’s the beau-ty of this country — its entrepreneuri-al ability. That’s one reason India will never be good at football — You give an Indian a corner and he’ll set up a shop there.”

With inputs from Amit Bapna and Shephali Bhatt

Igot my first real rural marketing experience about 27 years ago, when, to my utter dismay, as a fresh MBA with a ‘prestigious’ job of an account executive at Lintas, I was assigned to work on the launch of Wheel for Hindustan

Lever. The then marketing director, the famous Shunu Sen, insisted that I spend 15 days in Etah, in UP before he would even listen to any of my suggestions. Rural India was very different in those days and living in Etah, meant living with a village family. There was nothing like a hotel or even an inn. It also meant going to the fields for nature’s call and eating what the family cooked. I hated it, couldn’t see why I had to go through it, cheated and came back in 10 days. But Shunu was right. There is no other way of understanding what drives rural India. No text-book or documentary can substitute firsthand experience.

Later in life, it prompted me to launch from scratch a large rural marketing operation called Linterland, which grew tremendously and then lost its way, perhaps because later on, no one at the helm had ever had a real rural experience. It also prompted me to launch psLIVE Rural, in my current assignment, which has taken off bril-liantly, providing holistic solutions to rural mar-kets and scaling up to a network of 5000 + people within this year. I would attribute their success in part to the fact that I insist all the psLIVE Rural leadership spend at least 15 days a year in rural India. They are not the advertising executives who think driving for a few hours in an AC car to Meerut or Sholapur counts as a Rural Market Visit.

It’s because of the latter kind of so-called ru-ral experts, both at the client end and at the agen-cy end, that there are so many myths around the rural consumers, marketing and advertising. Sometimes they are so hilariously ridiculous, you feel embarrassed by their naivety. Let me deal with just three.

Myth 1: Rural India is homogeneousNothing can be further from the truth. In a rela-tive sense, rural India is more heterogeneous than urban India. Anyone who knows that there are over 625,000 villages in India will never make such a mistake. Incidentally, at a recent guest lecture I took for an MBA class, all aspiring cli-ents and advertising executives, 99% didn’t even get to a 200,000 mark on the number of villages. Most thought there were about 100,000 villages at the most, in India.

If you have ever done a rural marketing cam-

paign, you would know how different one village is from another, though visibly they may appear alike. Even within the same tehsil, forget the same district, villages can be chalk and cheese in terms of income levels, education, facilities,

healthcare etc. Unfortunately, because the caste system is still prevalent in India, even within a village there are differences. There are some-times clearly demarcated ‘Hindu’ areas or ‘Mus-lim’ areas or areas of a certain caste or profes-

sion. Demarcated by convention, not law, but definitely distinct. And they react differently to marketing and advertising inputs.

I was quite surprised that at a presentation on measuring rural TV audience under the pro-posed BARC ratings system, even a so called in-dustry expert presented a case for a lesser rural sample, since, in his view, the rural audience is ‘homogenous’.

Anyone who believes this or propagates this thinking just needs to spend one week travelling and living in villages and will know that this a total myth.

Myth 2: The rural consumer is a simpletonAdvertising often fans this myth and I find it dis-gusting that rural communication tends to be ‘Dumbed Down’ and stereotypical. Government advertising is often the biggest culprit.

The rural consumer is often smarter than the urban counterpart because his or her money is limited. I have seen rural consumers mentally calculate cost per bath of a bar of soap, which an urban consumer would never bother about.

Remember, village folk may be simple but are not simpletons. Talk down to them only at your own peril. They share the same aspirations as you and me, watch the same TV shows, want their children to be educated. They may have less disposable income, may sometimes have not had an opportunity to benefit from formal edu-cation but they are NOT simpletons.

Myth 3: Traditional influencers solely determine and drive village actionsPerhaps Bollywood needs to be blamed for this myth. It’s time some of the Bollywood script writers visited real villages. They may realise that the heydays of ‘Thakurs’ and ‘Mukhiyas’are well past their use-by date. The average vil-

lager makes up his or her own mind. The village ‘dakiya’ (postman) or the headmaster and sar-panch and many others do have an influence. But so does the young guy who made it big in a city and is now bringing white goods and mak-ing a pucca house in the village.

The explosion of mobiles has really flattened the world. Information is flowing more rapidly, TV is becoming an influencer and the village versions of AAP or Arab Spring are mushroom-ing. The villagers are today more aware of their rights than ever before.

This is not to say that there is no exploitation or that there is no influence at all of the tradi-tional influencers. There is but it is decreasing and is definitely not a sole influence. The rural society is at the cusp of a social change.

Urbanisation, increasing education through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, media influence, more money in hand through MNREGA and other schemes, mobile phones, better connectivity are all contributing to this and that’s why this myth is being busted rapidly as we speak.

In conclusion I would only like to state that, in my view, many marketers and most advertising agencies are still caught in a world of rural myths. I urge them not to believe me but to actu-ally spend some time in Rural India, living like how the villagers do, even if it is for a few days, and they will come back richer in experience and will create more relevant communica-tion solutions.

The author is chair-man & CEO South

Asia - Dentsu Aegis Network and chairman

Posterscope & psLIVE - Asia Pacific

Mythbusting: Popular rural marketing myths debunked

Into The Discomfort Zone

Dentsu Aegis’ Ashish Bhasin speaks about how some hoary beliefs about rural markets are just plain wrong

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Priyanka Nair

Technology and rural have made for un-easy bedfellows. What scope does tech-nology — at least as conventionally un-derstood by city dwellers — have in parts of the world where a paved road or

24 hour electricity are regarded as minor mira-cles? And yet, various contemporary technolo-gies have found their way into the arsenal of rural marketers across the country. What start-ed with the remarkable innovation of GPS equipped trucks in the early 2000s have come a long way. Here’s how:

Promoting Digital LiteracyEarly in the game, HUL gave a technology boost to rural marketing. Its Project Shakti en-hanced its direct rural reach and created liveli-hood opportunities for underprivileged wom-en by making them hyper localised distribu-tors of its products selling directly to villagers and retailers. In 2012, as part of this program, 40,000 women were equipped with a basic smartphone with software which enabled them to take and bill orders, manage inventory and receive updates on promotional schemes.

Moving sectors to telecom, Idea Celluar dis-covered its subscribers in rural communities of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were only using the voice function on GPRS enabled fea-ture phones. This was mainly because they were unaware of mobile internet, assumed it to be complicated and only meant for the well edu-cated or people with high income. To address this, Idea launched an initiative called ‘Har Mo-bile Par Internet’ which was an extension to its popular ‘No ullu banaoing’ campaign. This ser-vice provided step-by-step digital literacy les-sons via IVR (Interactive Voice Response); a tu-

torial designed to teach consumers how to ac-cess and use the net on feature phones. The brand also helped users open Gmail and Face-book accounts, check train schedules and seat availability and search on Google.

Each tutorial was provided both in multiple languages on a toll-free short code. When a con-sumer finished listening to the tutorial, a WAP link was automatically sent via SMS to the con-sumer’s phone, enabling access to the informa-tion with a single click. “Today, more than a product demonstration they are interested to know its relevance in their life,” mentions Sashi Shankar, CMO, Idea Cellular.

Take Every Facebook User Seriously Recently, when Khurram Askari and his team from Insight Connect, a Hyderabad based rural marketing agency, were executing a campaign for a new car from Volkswagen’s stable in small towns of the Rayalseema region in Andhra Pradesh, they made some interesting observa-tions. To start off, the agency created a Face-book page for the campaign and tagged the peo-ple of the town. It was well-received and helped increase footfalls during the activity. One of the Chief Wage Earners (CWE) who attended the event was accompanied by his family. The activation team didn’t really have to explain the features because the family had collective-ly done their homework looking at the brand’s

social pages. They were attending the event to understand pricing and booking details.

Yesterday the influencer and opinion leader was the sarpanch. Today it could be a universe of friends and acquaintances, accessible via Facebook. “A van campaign with folk artist, a Dappu dance troupe, a magician or an emcee no longer catch eyeballs. Digital tools are changing things,” observes Askari.

Integration Can Be As Simple As Bringing Mobile And Radio TogetherFor a brand like Greenlight Planet which spe-cialises in the production of solar lamps, rural households are clearly their target group. The brand decided to initiate a campaign in Bihar. A survey from Game Changer (the agency partner), revealed that consumers usually sus-pect hype and are cautious of unknown brands.The survey also pointed that consum-ers rely heavily on word of mouth. Keeping this in mind the brand and agency chose an integrated approach by using AIR (All India Radio), community radio and mobile to reach and engage with the potential consumers. The conversations collated were around the actual problems faced by villagers during power cuts. A few of those opinions were then broadcast to capture the attention of other people from various districts. The company also pushed out a missed call number. Later, pre-recorded

voice messages were delivered to people who gave missed calls. This campaign helped the brand generate over 11,000 leads. Approxi-mately 30% of total leads have been converted. According to Girish Chaturvedi, business head - GameChanger, NetCore, “For a new cat-egory it is always a challenge to get the right reach and impressions. Integration of tech-nology helps in repeat engagement and gener-ating effective returns.”

There’s An App Or Two For Rural As WellDabur India has used mobile to track its rural initiatives. For its Project Double, an initiative to increase its rural reach twofold, the compa-ny’s sales force used mobile phones to report sales. Phones were equipped with maps show-ing the demographics and market potential of each locality, to improve rural coverage.

While brands are doing their bit to connect with the new tech savvy natives of rural com-munities, there are a number of companies that are launching interesting products. For instance, founded in 2006 United Villages is a mobile based service that provides people with digital access to local products and ser-vices through kiosks powered by WiFi. The company also acts as a mobile-based distribu-tor of goods.This Jaipur-based network was taken over by Oxigen Services, a payments

solutions provider in 2012. The next phase for the company is to use Oxigen’s mobile based wallet system to enable mobile based payment for its rural customers. Another interesting example of a tech company captivating the rural markets is Vinfinet Technologies’ Kisan Raja. It is a GSM-based controller that allows farmers to control irrigation pumps using mobile or landline phones from within the comforts of the house.

“Rural marketing in the present and the fu-ture is all about leveraging the big leap made possible by technology. Technology touches rural marketing in small bits and pieces, quite like a technology jigsaw puzzle, pieces of which you will use today to make that big pic-ture in the future,” says brand consultant Har-ish Bijoor.

‘E-commerce’ To Change The GameOnline marketplaces are partnering with rural artisans to bring their products to cities, a move that is helping keep traditional craft alive. On the other hand, there are other e-com-merce companies that are targeting these com-munities. Ashish Bhasin, chairman & CEO, South Asia Dentsu Aegis Network believes that in five years to a decade, ecommerce will leapfrog. “Combine mobile for access, ecom-merce for placing orders and our vast post of-fice network for delivery and there’s a potential explosion of demand waiting to happen. If ru-ral e-commerce can be properly promoted, it will open a market much bigger than the entire urban market put together,” he says.

priyanka.nair@timesinternet.in

Shephali Bhatt

Planning the cost model for going rural is like planning a Big Fat Indian Wedding, only tougher. First, unlike ‘normal’ weddings where at least there’s clarity on who the groom is, here you’re mostly

struggling to figure out ‘Who’s my consumer?’ Is it the mere desh ki dharti type farmer from the Manoj Kumar films of yore? Or the cab drivers and the liftmen who have a rural mindset but stay in cities?

By the time a brand figures this out, it’s thwarted by another hurdle: measurement. Ru-ral doesn’t have an IRS or a TAM equivalent. In an industry obsessed with currency, the absence of one makes a marketer solely dependent on sales figures. But rural programmes (the non-tactical variety) have the tendency of having no impact on operating income in the pilot phase.

No RoI formula? No problem, you’ll say, and do monthly research to find out when your hoarding or wall painting becomes a blind spot. But that ends up eating further into sales since that’s where the budget for rural comes from and not from advertising or marketing. Surprised? This only covers half the woes a ru-ral marketer has.

A rural marketer’s biggest worry, according to George Angelo, executive director - sales, Dabur India, is the logistical cost of serving the rural market. Let’s try and understand the math by way of a simple equation: Market potential Salary of distributor + Cost of Vehicle*No. of Km covered everyday

For rural, the salary of the distributor might be half of what an urban wholesaler gets. But the cost of vehicle is far higher. Simply because it has to be a high capacity vehicle running many kilo-metres per day on roads that are sometimes in-distinguishable from rally tracks.

Simply put, if the cost of acquiring an urban market is ‘100’, it comes to ‘180’ to ‘200’ for a ru-ral market. Since you’re selling a low-cost SKU to the rural consumer, your profits don’t justify the cost.

This pretty much sums up the reasons why

most rural marketing plans are dead on arriv-al. Don’t fret, here comes the life support:

1) Don’t start with an All-India plan: As Dalveer Singh, head of experiential market-ing, APAC at GroupM points out: An average rural initiative requires six months of plan-ning and three months of execution. The fa-mous Lifebuoy Swasthya Chetna campaign had a pilot phase that lasted for 16-18 months. These initiatives needs your full commitment. You can’t be half-pregnant. Therefore, you con-quer one district at a time.

2) Pilot ideas yourself. Involve a third party when it’s time to scale up: Explains Salil Dalal, president — RURBAN division at Pidilite: When you develop a module in-house, you create a benchmark for execution costs and potential benefits. It’s better to hire an agency to take it up from there. Which is what they did when they held an in-market kiosk activity to demonstrate ‘Free and Easy repair’ of items using Fevikwik, MSeal, Fevitite.

3) Don’t treat rural as an extension of urban:For when you make that assumption, and ap-point urban wholesalers to handle rural distri-bution, the attrition rate goes up by 50%. Whereas, the rural-bred wholesaler attrition rate is confined to 10%, says Dabur’s Angelo.

While we’re at it, don’t make any one village your yardstick for rural India.

4) How do you find a village that makes you say ‘This is It’? Well, a lot of factors will have to be considered. Penetration of TV and mobiles, number of schools, connectivity to the highway. What is most important though, is that your pilot market needs to be stable on all other (aforemen-tioned) aspects except one - the test factor. So, if your objective is to get more people to use Vim bar, you’ll have to start with villages where peo-ple use raakh (ash)to clean dishes and then pro-gress to those using counterfeit bars.

5) Let the message decide the medium and not the other way around, please? Typical cost sav-ing technique that doesn’t bode well when you see the big picture. Let’s stick to the Vim bar and raakh example. The shift in use is not something that a wall/shutter painting can motivate. You’ll have to demonstrate it via live skits or kiosks in fairs and haats (weekly markets). Spend wisely since you’re spending anyway.

6) Indices are your friends. Use them when you’re muddled with the question - ‘How much to spend’. For instance, Godrej Consumer Products division monitors brand awareness levels pre and post the activity to determine whether to scale it up or not. Judging the cost per contact and

keeping a targeted payback period helps as well.

7) Set aside a sum from estimated sales. Half the margin from the expected sales can be allocated to your rural campaign. That makes it sustaina-ble, says Ashish Bhasin, chairman & CEO, South-Asia, of Dentsu Aegis Network. But that’s if half or more of your sales is coming from rural. Fig-ure out the percentage contribution and ear-mark away.

8) If all else fails, hire Sonu to make life Jhin-galala. After struggling to increase penetration in rural for three years, Tata Sky found out that every village has a Sonu, a boy who’s good with screwdrivers. So, their service providers tied up with Sonus and every Sonu would handle a circle of 10-12 villages. These were volunteers and not permanent hires with Tata Sky so the entire set-up worked on a variable cost model. “My HR would’ve resigned if I had started hiring Sonus and we have 20,000 of them now,” quips Harit Nagpal, CEO of Tata Sky. While there’s some training cost, the infrastructure cost is zero be-cause the DTH brand doesn’t have to setup offices in every village. A good cost model for scaling up in rural markets, this.

shephali.bhatt@timesgroup.com

Some marketers say that in their experience the rural–urban divide is blurring, and the whole idea of rural marketing as we knew it (haats, wall paintings, mobile vans, paisa packs, street corner demos on benefits and

methods of usage, etc) are now obsolete; that media, physical distribution, exposure to the world, income levels, access to ecommerce have drastically improved, so let’s officially end the era of specialists in rural markets. This is true if you drive through many of the more developed states with easy road and public and private transport connectivity to the nearest large town with jobs, more rural educational facilities and higher incomes thanks to non-agricultural jobs and to better paying crops.

Yet others have adopted the view that ‘rural’ in-cludes semi urban or peri-urban or rurban as it is variously called; that these are not really urban (even the census calls them ‘towns’ as opposed to real urban towns), but are not being classified as rural anymore because they do not fulfill the census defi-nition that if a location is rural, then 75% or more of the male work force must be employed in agricul-ture. 3894 such rurban locations, housing almost 40 million people (10% of urban population), lie in this twilight zone. By this definition of rural, marketers report that rural is showing far more exciting growth than urban and is behaving pretty much the same way.

But that’s the bright side of the moon. The dark side of the moon also exists. There is also an ex-tremely underdeveloped rural India, in low GDP, historically poor states with poor infrastructure, where it takes the genius of a Hindustan Unile-ver to build oases in the media and distribution dark desert.

People Research on India’s Consumer Economy, a newly established fact tank and think tank on In-dia’s consumer economy have, based on their 2014 all-India, large scale, household survey, the ICE 360 data base, segmented rural India (as defined by the census) into Developed, Emerging and Underdevel-oped Rural, and helps provide a data based map of market structure to help interpret what marketers are experiencing as consumer response in rural In-dia. (Table 1 captures the diversity of rural India well, and shows that “rural=urban” and “dark ru-ral” assumption are both true.)

Underdeveloped Rural does not look too exciting for a marketer. However, if you are familiar with the Indian number trick of how a large number of households earning a little bit each can add up to a lot, then you will not be surprised to find that under developed rural has 55% more income and 64% more expenditure than developed rural. Lots of gain, lots of pain, not every company’s cup of tea!

Another data driven insight that emerges from the ICE 360 data base is that if you consider all the people who are in the top 20% of per capita income in India, then 18% to 19 % each live in metros and in developed rural; and almost half of them (45% to be precise) live in census defined rural India.

So, of course rural markets are singing, and will sing in the future too. When a large mass of a whop-ping 180 million households, some quite small, starts to move even though at varying speeds, it makes for a market opportunity that is already larg-er than the urban market. Rural consumption ex-penditure is 56% of all India expenditure as we speak, and growing faster. So is rural marketing as we once knew it dead? Not quite, but there’s a differ-ent kind of poor but exposed and aware consumer out there, and a different kind of growing tribe of rural rich out there that needs a different cocktail of marketing tools.

Rama Bijapurkar and Rajesh Shukla are co-found-ers of People Research on In-dia’s Consumer Economy, a

think-tank and fact tank.

Tech It or Leave It

The Cost of Going Rural

The Facts of the Case

Why is cost the ultimate deterrent for any sound rural marketing plan and how do brands combat it? BE finds out

Rural is where Facebook is not just a pastime and technologies, old and new, converge with powerful effect, every day. Here’s how some companies are joining the next leap

Marketers must revise their rural marketing formula based on hard facts, say marketing strategy consultants RamaBijapurkar and Rajesh Shuklaas they uncover the two truths of rural India

Developed Rural

Emerging Rural

Under Developed

RuralHouseholds (mn) 29 53 97Average per capita income* 205 134 100

Average HH consumption spend* 203 133 100

% of HH belonging to Top 20% per capita income of India

40 17 8

% of CWE illiterate 1 7 16

OCCUPATION (%)Cultivators 25 30 28Grade 4 employment 17 9 7

Shop/Business owner 10 7 5

In the past 3 years my fi nancial condition has become better (%)

38 24 20

I am confi dent or most confi dent about stability of my major source of income (%)

61 45 39

% having cable/dish 84 49 30% having motorcycle 56 37 18

% having refrigerator 41 19 6

Source: ICE 360 data base of People Research on India’s Consumer Economy*Indexed to 100

THE ECONOMIC TIMES, MARCH 18-24, 2015 3

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Lifebuoy ‘Swasthya Chetna’

THE WORK: Washing hands before meals

or in general should be secondary nature,

but you’ll be surprised. In fact, a study by

the London School of Tropical Hygiene

revealed that washing hands with soap

and water can bring down cases of

diarrhoea by 47%, a drastic number for a

disease that reportedly claims the lives of

millions of people, of which 600000 are

Indian children.

Lifebuoy introduced the Swasthya

Chetna program, with their officers visiting

43,000 villages and schools in rural India

over the course of five years. They spread

awareness of washing hands, conducted

product and glowgerm UV demos,

competitions, aired interactive AVs and

overall hammered in the importance of a

simple hand-washing regime.

THE RESULT: Since its inception in 2002,

the campaign has made its way to over

110 million rural Indians. Over 30% of

Indians are more aware about harmful

germs, and soap consumption has

increased by 15%. The biggest recognition

for the campaign came in from the

government of India, with its special

edition postal stamp for Swasthya Chetna.

Hero MotoCorp ‘Service Har Jagah’

THE WORK: In 2010, Hero MotoCorp

(erstwhile Hero Honda) was already the No

1 bike manufacturer in the country. But the

company wanted to delve deeper into the

rural market and thus, ‘Service Har Jagah’,

a door-to-door servicing facility was born

in India’s small towns. It is a network of

customised bikes fitted with servicing

equipment that go around the country

servicing customers’ bikes in rural towns.

THE RESULT: 7500 villages were covered

each month, and about 70000 customers

were attended to. The initiative is still

ongoing.

Path (Sure Start) ‘Pehla Ek Ghanta’

THE WORK: Living in a city with access to

the best medical services 24x7 can really

spoil us. But this basic amenity is still a

dream for countless Indians, especially

those from small towns. In fact, the

struggle for many begins right at birth,

what with rural mothers having little or no

education in matters of childbirth.

Path (Sure Start) with Impact

Communications partnered to spread

awareness about infant mortality. They

launched ‘Pehla Ek Ghanta’ in UP small

towns, to disseminate information for a

new mother and her infant’s welfare. The

campaign comprised games, street plays,

flip books, film screenings, OOH and jingles

to educate the TG about birth, recognizing

danger signs, cord care and breast feeding

within the first hour of birth.

THE RESULT: 89% women from villages

with a population of 5,000 had a very

strong recall with ‘Pehla Ek Ghanta’, with

70% of the TG further educating their

families. The government of UP even

integrated some aspects of the campaign in

their own initiatives. Impact

Communications even picked up two Golds

in the RMAI Awards.

Shell ‘Khidki Amma’THE WORK: As we sit in our

homes eating food cooked by gas in

pipelines or cylinders, it could a stretch to

imagine a large chunk of the rural

population using wood and cow dung as

biomass for fuel. The resultant Indoor Air

Pollution (IAP) is rather harmful with

women and children particularly risking

asthma disorders and eye diseases. Some

simple ways to combat these are to open a

window to let the smoke out, leave the

children outside while cooking and using

smokeless stoves.

Shell and DDB Mudra Max introduced

the village gossip, ‘Khidki Amma’ to spread

awareness. The old woman would stand

outside windows and engage women in

gossip about the neighbours as they

cooked, convincing them to attend an

event in the village square. Next came

demos, street plays and games educating

women and children on the hazards of IAP

and solutions.

THE RESULT: IAP awareness doubled after

the activity, with 94% of the TG easily

recalling the solutions to tackle it when

quizzed. Women religiously began

throwing open their windows as they

cooked, reducing the risk of contracting

diseases significantly. DDB Mudra Max

also won a Gold for Rural Marketing

Program of the Year at the WOW Awards.

With inputs from Mandeep Malhotra,Executive Director, DDB Mudra Group and President & Head DDB MudraMax – OOH, Retail & Experiential

Even without the press ad driven by a clever visual pun and the mega-budget brand film, creativity is alive and well in the hinterlandsDelshad Irani and Mukta Lad

When herbal soap brand Medimix wanted to make inroads into the North (the brand’s traditional stronghold is the South), its agencies drafted an army of

chowkidars (watchmen) to do its bidding. After some research into hygiene habits of Northerners in rural territory, the advertiser discovered that people wouldn’t wash themselves after toiling in the fields all day. This would not only cause rashes and other skin diseases but also disturbed sleep. Also common practice in small towns and villages are patrolling night guards who yell “jaagte raho”to keep people alert and delinquents away. What does the brand do next? Get the chowkidars to yell “jaagte mat raho” as they trot on and give curious folk who step out of their homes a lesson on personal hygiene and brand benefits.

Ingenuity is perhaps the most important cre-ative tool for a rural advertiser. As a market ru-ral India is complicated and heterogeneous to a point where the only factor in common is the nomenclature — rural. As the urban-rural di-vide blurs in part due to migrating masses, mar-keters must recalibrate their understanding of rural India’s potential. And what it needs, wants, aspires to and engages with in order to effectively communicate with a section of the Indian population which will drive growth in the future.

While old school methods ought not to be dis-missed to reach poorer and more inaccessible quarters, word of mouth whether it’s online or off is the most effective of all. Success lies in marrying traditional media with the new, and

Have you ever seen a couple of wide-eyed kids feel the ocean at their feet for the first time ever? It’s incredibly enter-taining to watch and terribly

hard to describe what that fascina-tion and fear look like. That’s exact-ly what many first-time-rural-bound marketers look like.

Few FMCG marketers can deny the lure of rural India. These mar-kets are perhaps the only real next growth frontier for FMCG compa-nies. And yet, the trepidation in ap-proach is palpable. Marketers are struggling with increasing their reach through direct distribution and ensuring product availability across rural India. But the greater challenge lies in ensuring consumer demand, in parallel with an expand-ing distribution network.

Rural India demands its own mar-keting program. Several villages are still media dark; televisions coexist with power cuts. And advertising created for an urban audience sel-dom appeals to rural consumers. Marketers who’ve spent their lives developing programs for urban consumers find them-selves struggling to find a tried-and-tested blueprint. Here’s a pretty reliable starting point; the rest, of course, is up to every marketer’s imagination and budget.

STEP 1: Prioritise markets. Here’s a safe formula. Draw up a list of all districts where you’ve got a strong distribution net-work. Next, rank all districts based on their prosperity index. You can use Census data to derive your own parameters for defining this index. Finally, from all short-listed districts, pick villages within five kilometers of a highway. High-ways are the new water-bodies.

STEP 2: Create campaigns that change behavior. Don’t simply dumb-down your rural campaigns and serve out man-and-van opera-tions to an audience that now ex-pects, demands and knows more. Here’s an interesting question — what’s common between most rural activation programs and a Bolly-wood flick from the 90s? They’re both made for the lowest common denominator. We’re still executing man-and-van operations and plas-tering brand logos on every availa-ble wall across villages. Over the last eighteen months, four incredi-ble campaigns demonstrated quite nicely that this needn’t be the case. Lifebuoy’s Roti Reminder, Kan Kha-jura Tesan, Lifebuoy Jump Pump

and Vodafone’s Musical Earmuffs. If you aren’t familiar with this work, you must see it on YouTube. Remember, that in several cases, you’re not trying to move consum-ers from one brand to another. You’re attempting to create behav-ior change at a fundamental level; you’re, perhaps, asking consumers to replace ash with dish-washing powder!

STEP 3: Build contagious content. The power of advocacy, unless ex-perienced, is hard to describe and impossible to quantify. Use connec-tors and trusted advocates. For in-stance, beauty parlours have emerged as a powerful rural retail channel for categories such as fem-inine hygiene, beauty and skin care. Think digital. Most first-time rural marketers are surprised to discover the penetration of cyber cafes. While there is little data that gives a count, one can safely as-sume that one in three of India’s top 100,000 villages has a cyber café. Youth-centric brands won’t find better access to consumers.

Don’t discount the reach of smartphones. If data connectivity is a problem, think of other ways to reach consumers. Deploy systems

that enables your brand to physi-cally transfer relevant branded

content on to phones. Kan Khu-jura Tesan showed us another

simple, yet brilliant solu-tion.

STEP 4: It’s time for ac-tion. At the cost of

slightly overstocking your product, create a sense of abun-dance at retail points. Introduce

small pack consum-er promotions and

small bundled offers

to trigger trials. Take a punt; intro-duce higher-end brands from with-in your portfolio. The poor infra-structure in rural India confuses the marketing fraternity to think of rural India as poor India. This is, often, very far from the truth.

STEP 5: Create a system for moni-toring and measurement. Make sure you’ve got a system that places monitoring before measurement. There’s absolutely no way for your team to check if your brand has been activated in all the 50,000 vil-lages you’ve identified. Here’s an incredibly simple system: Activa-tion agents carry inexpensive smart phones that double up as GPS-enabled handhelds that help marketers watch and track the pro-gress of their rural marketing pro-grams, real-time, from the conveni-ence of their office computers.

Finally, measure the efficacy of your rural marketing program. Up-grade your monitoring dashboard to serve as an analytics dashboard. Build a model that allows you to link sales to marketing. Don’t go by in-dustry-established return-on-in-vestment benchmarks; create a ma-trix that works best for your busi-ness and brands.

Pick villages in batches of 5,000 and build on these steps, one step at a time, over two or three years. Rural India accounts for half of the coun-try’s GDP and 70% of our popula-tion. It’s time to go beyond experi-ments and stray pennies. The wa-ter’s warm and the ocean’s calm. Dive in; it’s time to discov-er what lies beyond the horizon.

The author is president – Ge-ometry Global

with technology and combining the jugaadschool of creativity with strategic thought. At this point of convergence is where the most ex-citing stuff happens.

While the book on creativity is more or less universal, the trick of course lies in finding the right idea. It can only be great if the idea and, in the rural context more importantly, execution have relevance. Says RS Kalsi, executive direc-tor — marketing & sales, Maruti Suzuki, “Suc-cess of any rural marketing campaign depends on understanding the need, listening to the cus-tomer, keeping him at the centre and then de-signing your campaign / products. Ensuring a strong connect by communicating in local lan-guages and using local media and audio visuals is important. The golden rule: “Keep it short and simple”. Don’t tweak urban campaigns and roll them out in rural. Often while trying to be creative, people complicate messages.”

The rules of delivering creativity are simple. Says Ali Harris Shere, marketing director at Britannia Industries, “Establishing brand-codes that are rich in colours and symbols is important for building salience and recall. ‘Voice’ as a manner of messaging is becoming big in rural. Britannia Tiger used IVR calls with Salman Khan very effectively to engage with retailers and consumers, thereby using mobile beyond mere push SMSes. Contextualizing the communication in a manner that’s relevant to

the rural consumer is essential.” For instance, when Britannia Marie went about communicat-ing in rural West Bengal, they skipped the usual health spiel and instead went with a message that was simple, relevant to the target audience with a sense of levity about it – Sahi Pasand, Swastha Parivaar.

Most importantly, rural is not a short run jour-ney, you need to stay invested in the long run for significant results, advises Kalsi. That’s precisely what bothers Keshav Chandorkar, national head - rural at Carat Media Services, who’s seen his share of marketers traipsing about the country-side with a ‘one size fits all’ approach who can’t quite fathom why they didn’t get the desired re-sults. So, they lose faith and pull out. All in a day’s work that. The moral of the story is understand-ing the consumer is key. And that has nothing to do with geography, sirji.

Once you’ve got that down, ideas are not hard to come by as the case studies we’ve covered in this special issue of BE and here (read Case For Creativity) make abundantly clear. That’s on top of the international award winning works like Lifebuoy’s ‘Roti Reminder’ and last year’s Cannes Lions darling ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ from HUL. In fact, what we’ve discovered while work-ing on this issue, is that although not exactly abundant, some of the truly creatively innova-tive, integrated and surprising work coming out of India is not, in fact, targeted at hipsters and yuppies. Perhaps it’s time we learn a thing or two about creativity from the country mouse.

delshad.irani@timesgroup.com

Creativity In Rural

The Quick & Not So Easy Guide To Going Rural

Case for Creativity

1Case Study

2Case Study

New in tehsil? Want to make new friends with a serious pitch to the locals? Geometry Global’s Rahul Saigal tells marketers where to start and how to win #rural

3Case Study

4Case Study

THE ECONOMIC TIMES, MARCH 18-24, 2015 4

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