Page 216 - DMGT509_RURAL MARKETING

Unit 11: Promotion Strategies for Rural Market

2. Importers advertise to sell their goods to the target segment. Notes
3. Distributors, Retailers and other members of distribution channel advertise to sell their
products. Since their area of operation is limited their advertising is also confined to the
geographic area they serve.
4. Mail Order Suppliers advertise so that their catalogues are purchased by their target
segment, which could result in their getting orders by mail. Burlington’s and Readers
Digest are examples of mail order suppliers.
The second category of advertisers are non-governmental organizations, like family planning
groups, destitute children help groups, de-addiction centres.
From the earlier days of hand painted posters, media has come up with Cable and
Satellite TV Revolution. Joining the bandwagon is Internet and Computer designing of
advertisements.
Broadly media is characterized as follows:

1. Press: Local press for the rural markets.
2. Electronic: Indian villages are getting the Radio throughout the day, while TV coverage
amounts 40 per cent of the radio coverage.

3. Computer, Internet: computers and internet race as started only now and the villagers are
quite removed from the real life acceptance.
4. Outdoor: hoardings like wall paintings are quite popular in rural India.

5. Point of purchase: rural shops keep only robust wall hangings, danglers. They need to
look attractive to the villagers sensibility.
6. Direct Mail: with low level of education in the villages, in stead of direct mail more
effective option would be audio-visual advertising.
7. Miscellaneous: like balloons in the sky, camels and elephants with visual banners can be
more useful.

Press

Press, more especially newspaper, provides greater flexibility, timeliness, good local coverage,
good acceptance by the readers and high degree of believability. Press has, however, low shelf
life, and production quality is usually suspect and only a small target audience. Local press,
pamphlets in Hindi or in local language would be useful.
Television on the other hand, combines both audio and visual imagery with colour and motion
causes greater grip on the customer’s psyche, has high reach. However, TV costs are high, less
time for the customer to see it with a lot of congestion in a highly erratic viewer-ship situation.
In villages with low power coverage and long outages TV viewing, although much looked for,
becomes a rarity, a pipe dream only. However, with better power cover, TV in the long run is
going to be the media for the village masses. Till then, the weekly markets visits by the company
publicity vans are most useful as they carry advertising audio-visuals, leaflets, samples and
even product for sale.

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