Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, Mar 06, 2009
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version | Audio | Blogs
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, Mar 06, 2009 ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version | Audio | Blogs |
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Industry & Economy
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Rural Development Marketing - Rural Marketing Truly rural 
Sudhanshu Ranade Chennai, March 5 Mobile operators and FMCG brand managers trying to increase rural coverage know full well that 36 per cent of the country’s six lakh villages together contain only seven per cent of the rural population. Another 24 per cent have an average population of only 725. The figures might seem mind-boggling to people coming across these facts for the first time. How, then, they will ask themselves, have such high rates of rural penetration been achieved? The main reason is: by use of the hub-and-spoke model. In most areas, 15-20 villages, large and small, can be found within five kilometres of a ‘central’ village. I had an opportunity to see one such system in operation in the early 1980s in a village called Sategaon in Vidarbha. The village then had a population of only 3,700, yet five truck loads of ‘groceries’ would find their way in every week from Akola, a ‘district headquarter town’ about 100 km away where the traders of Sategaon did their mail-order shopping. Only a fraction of this material would be consumed at Sategaon itself. The rest would fan its way out to the neighbouring villages. For some reason, Brooke Bond had a parallel network of its own. Its ‘agent’ would visit each of the ‘spokes’ around Sategaon in a rented tonga, once a week. The only reason why this man used the bank branch at Sategaon as his ‘hub’ was that he had been told to deposit his collections with the branch, for remittance free of charge to Brooke Bond’s collection account at SBI, Mumbai. How rural retail stacks up The great rural push The consumer as seller More Stories on : Rural Development | Rural Marketing
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