India's rural growth engine: the need to address rural diversity

Abstract

Purpose

The article aims to examine the rural‐urban divide used as a premise for idiomatic understanding of Indian rural consumers, and review current practices. This may be self limiting, and may trap marketers in an idiom that is not in touch with current realities in the rapidly evolving rural market. The paper highlights the rapid changes, emerging segments, the factors affecting change, and the need to revisit the rural idiom, with a more nuanced, stratified, granular look at the differences among rural consumer segments.

Design/methodology/approach

It looks at existing literature and recent consumer survey reports, and notes the existing practitioner mindset, and current practices reported in literature industry forums and popular press.

Findings

Recent surveys help posit the rise of the rural middle class, highlighting four sets of factors causing changes in the rural households' consumption patterns. It concludes that the most critical need is to understand values, needs, aspirations, social norms and realities, nature and pace of change to develop effective competitive strategies to address rural consumers, especially its middle class.

Research limitations/implications

It is limited in its opinions due to the dependence on reports of prior surveys and existing literature.

Practical implications

It identifies areas for future research to capture this change, and proposes the variables that must be kept in mind for generating adequate consumer insights. This is proposed through an initial re‐stratification and psychographic mapping of consumers for better rural marketing initiatives.

Social implications

Marketers have embarked on methods twining social uplift through economic empowerment, with programs building on distribution reach and efficiency helping them expand their own business. Better insights into rural diversity should help expand the programs and create more impact.

Originality/value

It has brought together diverse perspectives from practice and literature, and focussed attention on specific drivers of change, and how they will create greater diversity going forward. This will help focus on new segments, and proposes a newer paradigm for researching rural consumers.

Citation

Mookerjee, A. (2013), "India's rural growth engine: the need to address rural diversity", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 171-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIBR-02-2013-0017