Collective Retailing through Social Franchising in India:An Approach towards Rural Retail and Social Empowerment

Retail is regarded as one of the most promising industry towards economic development because of its huge opportunity to provide employment to diverse workforce (unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled) and infrastructure upliftment. Although in India development of retail is variably unstructured according to geographies. Metropolitan cities are the first choice of any brand, tier II or so called B-cities are having access to some players while rural areas are yet to witness actual retail development. There are various reasons contributing towards this situation varying from Market structure to customer attributes to brand intentions. The present study tries to focus on collective retail as an option to target "yet-to-be" market areas for retail brands using Social franchising as a tool for same and to provide a conceptual framework towards social development and empowerment in those areas.