The rural marketplace in India is getting more and more attractive day by day and stagnation of sales in the urban markets is forcing marketers to go rural. However, rural markets have their own unique features, and the traditional advertising media generally proves to be unsuccessful in rural areas. This article talks about non-conventional media which marketers use to target rural consumers.

"The challenge is to create communication that would help the rural consumer in recognizing brands, logos, visuals, colours."

The Indian rural population has an estimated number of 120 million households which is more than 70% of the total households of the country. In such a scenario, even a fraction of the rural consumers is a big market to generate enough revenues and profits. Coupled with that, stagnation of sales in the urban market and cutthroat competition are forcing the marketers to shift their focus towards rural markets. Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) was one of the pioneers in the rural market and through its projects like "Project Shakti"; HLL was successful in developing a very strong marketing network in rural India. This was followed by ITC's "e-choupal" and slowly companies such as Coca-Cola, Colgate, Eveready, Philips, etc., are trying to establish their foothold in the rural market.

Conventional media such as television and radio still does not have a good reach in the rural areas when compared to the urban areas. Besides this, press and satellite television also have a poor reach because of lack of infrastructural facilities although among all the conventional media, television has the widest reach and around 50% of the rural consumers can be reached through television. That may be one of the reasons behind the successful ad campaign by Coca-Cola with tagline: "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola". One of the ads in the services showed a farmer in Punjab (Aamir Khan) to whom three young city girls come to ask for something cool. Aamir smiles and takes out Coca-Cola bottles from a well (Refer to Figure 1 for a clip from the ad). The advertisement campaign led to increase in sales for Coca-Cola in rural India. The basic problem of conventional media is that it fails to generate the desired change in attitude of the rural consumer in most cases. This may rise out of the problem of identification with oneself. The message may be very good and the media may have a good reach, but the rural consumer may not be able to identify himself/herself with the advertisement. And here lies the importance of non-conventional media in rural areas. (Though, to the rural consumer it is not non-conventional).

Marketing Mastermind Magazine, Rural Marketing, Traditional Advertising Media, Rural Markets, Conventional Media, Non-conventional Media, FMCG Companies, Strategic Marketing, Rural Advertising, Attention-Interest-Desire-Action Model, Hindustan Lever Limited.