Consumerism in Rural India: a Study on Buying Behaviour for Consumer Durables

The purpose of the investigation was to study the buying behaviour for consumer durales in rural India.Over the past few years, the rural markets have emerged as one of the most lucrative markets for Indian companies. In the recent past, many organizations have forayed into rural areas and this has proved fruitful and beneficial for them. The Indian rural markets provide abundant opportunities for organizations to enter and operate profitably. Rural India has emerged as a large market for numerous goods and services such as financial services, FMCG, healthcare, consumer durables and telecommunications. In today's competitive scenario, the rural markets are even more vital than urban markets for marketers as part of their green ocean strategy. But this journey has not been so easy. It has been the effort of continuous positioning with innovative methods of promotions designed to suit rural masses. Still the road is less travelled. India still has more than 6 lac villages contributing to almost 60 per cent of India's population. Out of these more than 50 per cent villages are of population spread less than 500. This makes them very difficult to trace when it comes to know their buying behaviour or for designing a communication strategy for these people. Not to mention the age old hurdles such as poorly developed communication channels, difficulty in direct distribution, erratic monsoons resulting to fluctuating incomes and so on makes rural India a tough target to achieve. Still we have got successful examples in the area of rural marketing such as HUL, P and G, Marico and Godrej etc. Some telecoms such as DOCOMO, MTS, and UNINOR have even reversed the formula as to go rural first then to urban. This makes it clear that everyone is betting on Rural India and will keep on investing in it for better future prospects.