There is no homogenous picture of the rural consumer that emerges. Management Consultant and Author of ‘We are like that only’ , Rama Bijapurkar believes that non-agricultural rural India is about half of the total and is growing. In terms of wealth, there are as many rich people in rural India as there are in urban India. So, it is time to get rid of stereotypes of India and go for the rural market the modern way, she added.

On how a rural marketing operations work, D Shivakumar, VP and MD, Nokia India said, “It doesn’t change dramatically from an FMCG model in terms of distribution but where it changes significantly is its approach to service and care. In an FMCG situation, if the product is not good enough people don’t come back. They just tell the retailer that I don’t like this brand, but in our business we have the trust and commitment to repair that product.”

 Rohtash Mal, Executive Director & CEO, Escorts Agri Manufacturing Group said, “For all the consumption in rural areas to happen, there has to be creation of wealth or disposable income at the hands of the farmer. As productivity starts coming in focus, productivity of land, farm equipment, tractors etc, find a very major role in the rural economy.”

 Excerpts from CNBC-TV18’s exclusive interview with D Shivakumar, Rohtash Mal and Rama Bijapurkar:

Q: Rural India is not just about the small farmer and the labourers. Is it time for the marketers to revisit the rural marketing strategy?

Bijapurkar: Non-agricultural rural India is about half of the total and is growing. In terms of wealth, there are as many rich people in rural India as there are in urban India. So, it is time to get rid of stereotypes of India and go for the rural market the modern way.

Q: What is the changing profile of the farmers because you cannot dispute the fact that they are still the largest constituency in the rural area?

Mal: For all this consumption to happen, there has to be creation of wealth or disposable income at the hands of the farmer. As productivity starts coming in focus, productivity of land, farm equipment and tractors find a very major role in the rural economy.

I see the consumers far more aware as we travel the hinterland wanting to know how exactly new knowledge can be applied to changing farm productivity levels and actually seeking out better and better methods.

Another lever that seems to be driving it is that farm labour is not so available and prices of farm labour are going up.

Q: Do you have 60% market share today or thereabouts?

Shivakumar: Yes.

Q: How much of that is rural India?

Shivakumar: The penetration in rural India is under 5% today. But as we go forward, India has a subscriber base of two million at the end of April. The bulk of that will come from rural India.

Q: Give us a sense of how you will work the rural market?

Shivakumar: We cannot do it on our own and here is where partnerships in the eco-system matter. We work with the operators such as Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance. We work with them because they are the people who are putting up the task or are laying the railway line.

Then we know exactly where the tasks are coming up and work with them to ensure that we go to the right trade partners to deliver the product. We recognize that educating the trade is absolutely critical because advertising does not reach everyone and not everybody has the experience of this category.

Q: How does the rural marketing operation works?

Shivkumar: It does not change dramatically from an FMCG model in terms of distribution. But it changes significantly in its approach to service and care. In an FMCG situation, if the product is not good enough people do not come back.

They just tell the retailer that they do not like the brand. But in our business we have the trust and commitment to repair that product

Q: When you had that battery advisory that you issued BL-5C, how much of that did you have to deal with in the rural area and how easy was it given the infrastructure to deal with it?

Shivkumar: The whole retail channel came in huge support of Nokia because there are 1,30,000 outlets selling mobile phones. The last 75,000, which are selling mobile phones, sell only one brand, which is Nokia. To them, it was livelihood and food on the table. So, they came out in hoards to support Nokia and we value that.

Q: We have heard the fact that low per capita spending, geographical spread and poor infrastructure get in the way of marketers tapping into rural demand profitably. Are these factors changing? How do you go about changing these factors?

Bijapurkar: A lot of it is changing and if one drives through the villages of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Punjab, one will find that the distance to the nearest town, which has the nearest Nokia store or modern format store, is quite close by. There are almost 150 districts of rural India that have assets and ability like urban India and are very close to urban by any definition.

So, if we think about it, they are oasis and deserts. The oasis are very urban like. So, there are parts of India, which are very hard to reach, but a lot of them are not as difficult as we would imagine them to be.

Q: In spite of this, you have charged marketers and saying that they are not doing enough, why is that?

Bijapurkar: It is underserved in terms of quality of what is being offered to it. A lot of companies tend to make a mistake of saying that we don’t have to innovate the future for the rural market. I say it is underserved because a lot of marketers tend to think about rural India the same way we complain that global companies think about India. They are stuck in the dark ages but actually rural India is going to leap.

Shivkumar: You need to look at rural India differently and the biggest difference which will catapult rural India is the youth. Wherever I go into rural India, the youth have a huge burning desire to change. They do not want to be farmers. They want fundamental change in their lives. So the skill set, which the father had is not replicable and is not transferable to the next generation.

Q: Youth will drive the change. They don’t want to be farmers, what are you going to do?

Mal: That is where our machines step-in. But I would not go so far as changing the marketing community. I have been there, it is very difficult to create business models. This is a new India and a different India. Applying what we have learnt for 25-30 years of our lives into something like this is a challenge and it takes a while before a business model can be made to emerge and typically what companies try and do is do it all themselves.

This is the age of partnerships and of alliances. Somewhere this is going to start exploding once this new template comes in.

To understand the rural consumer better, watch video....