Organizations should focus on nurturing the rural markets as they offer a huge potential for business and should have a long-term perspective rather than concentrating on achieving the short-term objectives. The future is certainly bright for the Indian rural market through the effective implementation of STP strategy, which will create more room for all players, including consumers, marketers and investors.

Rural India does constitute an attractive and sizeable market, and marketers have to strive hard for securing a share. The rural markets throw up a variety of challenges, and the marketers have to grapple with them and find innovative solutions. Some important features of the rural markets.

Marketers need to design creative solutions to overcome challenges, typical of the rural environment such as physical distribution, channel management, promotion and communication. The urban-rural divide in FMCG consumption is being bridged rapidly. In the case of some high-volume consumables such as toilet soaps, washing powders, packaged tea, biscuits and detergent cakes, the penetration and usage in urban and rural market is comparable, because companies now segment their customers into similar clusters in order to market specialized products and services to each group. Initially, marketers in India concentrated on the segmentation of only the urban market. But with the saturation of urban markets in recent years and the simultaneous growing demand in rural markets, the need to segment the rural market is increasing. More and more companies are moving away from the assumption that rural consumers are a homogeneous mass with little or no differences. Marketers are beginning to divide the rural market into homogeneous segments, in order to reach out to each segment more effectively.

Marketing Mastermind Magazine, STP, Marketing Strategy, Indian Rural Markets, BSNL Mobile Phones, Hindustan Lever Ltd., HLL, Information Technology, Marketing Communication, Product Management, Rural Environment, FMCG Consumption, Urban Market, Nirma Chemicals, Indian Markets, Life Insurance Corporation of India, Market Segmentation, Indian Rural Market.