Page 22 - DMGT509_RURAL MARKETING

Unit 1: Rural Marketing – An Introduction

population the land size per family gets smaller ever so often, resulting in migration from Notes
villages to towns. In metros like Delhi and Mumbai population increase has taken its toll on the
civic services, which keep crumbling. With better health facilities, average age has increased
and now India has a large population of senior citizens. Teen population has also increased with
improved health care.
India has seen social evolution of women who are now taking active part in various activities.
They can be seen in offices, politics, and defense services, that is practically in every sphere of
human endeavour.

1.11 Market and Manufacture

In the beginning, the producers or manufacturers were small, they sold their wares in local
areas, and once the demand for the product got established, the buyers used to throng around
the manufacturers to pick up the product:
In India till the first half of twentieth century, it was totally a sellers market; whatever the
manufacturer produced was easily sold. The emphasis was on production and quality was not of
much importance. The main reason for the situation was lack of competition and near monopoly
situation for almost all the products.
Later on as the competition started seeping into most businesses it became imperative that sales
people coordinate with manufacturing team, to give them the idea of demand and the volumes
or numbers of product which can be sold, to enable them in production planning. The stress so
far stayed on manufacturing. A good firm was one, which had always a few more orders than the
quantity, which could be produced in the given time. This put pressure on manufacturing to
produce more goods, further putting product quality on the back burner.
As manufacturing needs raw materials they are buyers of the same plus they buy certain
components made by others, and some consumables, like power, water, and at times certain
gases. Hence, the picture looked as given below:

Suppliers of RM / Manufacturers/ Buyers
Components converters

Later still, people started just buying/selling and became vendors or middleman.
It was from 1991, that India opened its door to foreign players and competition became a major
force to reckon with by the businessmen of India. Following types of products became available
in the market:

1. Consumer durables could be as varied as cars, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, washing
machines and computers.
2. FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) products include soaps, shampoos plus food items.

3. Industrial capital goods are the product manufacturing machines like sugar mills, textile
mills.
4. Raw materials are iron, steel, rubber, wood and others.

5. Industrial consumables include water, power, gases, which are consumed in the
manufacturing process. They do not become part of the product.
6. Service includes the hotel industry, airlines, hospitals, insurance.

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