Rural marketing: the bottom-of-the-pyramid game
09 May 2008
The Marcus Evans conference 'Proactive Rural Marketing Strategies' brought together executives from companies across industries to discuss the challenges and triumphs of their endeavours in rural marketing. Dhruv Tanwar reports from the venue
Mumbai: The opening session, which was also one of the most interesting of the first day of the two-day conference, was by S K Roy, executive director, Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), and possibly on of the biggest rural marketers in the country.
LIC: Selling life insurance to farmers
Narrating from personal experience, Roy provided deeply insightful peeks into his experiences with rural marketing at LIC, which innovates its products to specifically appeal to the needs of the rural consumer. He also talked about banking and insurance markets which form symbiotic relationships when it comes to tapping rural markets, with banking being an excellent distribution channel for marketing insurance products.
Citing the example of LIC tapping the extensive branch network of nationalised banks in deep, miles-from-anywhere locations, he said the model has allowed for unprecedented penetration by LIC into rural India.
The critical success factor in succeeding in India's rural markets is the element of trust that a company has to gain from the rural consumer, Roy said in conclusion.
HughesNet Fusion: Providing technology to rural marketers
Vaibhav Magow, director, marketing, HughesNet Fusion, a company that builds shared IT infrastructure and connectivity in rural India, said rural markets would be the growth engine for times to come, while talking about HughesNet Fusion's pay-per-use shared infrastructure in rural areas that is available to a number of companies to set up their presence in rural markets.
Magow said that by providing broadband access of a minimum of 256 kbps though satellite connectivity, his company provides access to the wired world from rural market locations, which will soon herald a mini-revolution or ''a tsunami of change'' (as the case may be) in various fields such as medicine and health care, once telemedicine initiatives come to rural markets in India.
