UNDERSTANDING RURAL MARKETS – A STUDY OF POTENTIAL OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Around the world, four billion people lives in poverty and marketing firms are still struggling to turn them into customers. For the past decade, business visionaries have argued that these people, dubbed the “Base of the Pyramid”, make up an enormous, untapped market. Some of the world's biggest, savviest corporations have aimed to address their basic needs — by selling them everything from clean water to electricity and from FMCG to consumer durables. “Improving the lives of billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid is a noble endeavor. It can also be a lucrative one. Fast pace of technology advanced every sphere of social, economic, political cultural life, produce, reduce costs, distribute, and expect higher profits. The focus is on tapping the rural markets. Urban markets have saturated lied to look rural markets. This paper presents a review of rural markets" environment, Problems and strategies in India. Rural marketing has become the latest mantra of most corporate even MNCs are eyeing rural markets to capture the large Indian market. This throws an open ground challenge to the marketers in a country with multi-cultural, multi-lingual varsity. This paper is an attempt to provide some mettle solutions to these challenges as it studies and follows some successful rural marketing strategies of modern times.