The four A’s of rural marketing

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: Shailesh Prabhu who is currently a senior manager for Philips CTV in Mumbai has completed five years in Philips in appliances sales, and, then in CTV marketing.

Since past one year, Prabhu has been involved in marketing Vardaan CTV series in rural markets and the challenges faced were on the availability, affordability, awareness, and, providing after-sales service.

As a first step, Prabhu took the initiative of launching Vardaan range of CTV and understanding the villagers concerns made the Philips CTV more affordable without compromising on the quality of the product.

For the purpose, he implemented rural promotion programmes in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, among other states. In terms of availability, the biggest bottleneck was making it cost-effective to the distributors.

Prabhu says the total CTV market size is around 8 million in units of which 40% of the market is in the less than one lakh population.

The all India market is growing at about 9%, whereas, in rural India, the market is growing at the pace of 20%. Now, the penetration of CTV in rural India is only 7% compared to all India penetration of 24%.

He says the factors of growth in rural India are the electrification drive by the government, the direct-to-home facility which is available now in the rural India, upgradation from black and white television to colour television, and, finally, good monsoon is expected even this year which will result in more disposable income in rural India.

In order to meet the evolving needs of villagers, Prabhu took the right step in promoting and establishing the Vardaan brand in the rural India.

“What I observed was Philips had a very good equity in rural India due to its radio penetration in these markets, and, the consumers saw Philips as a reliable, trustworthy and good value-for-money brand,’’ he says.

The biggest challenge which Philips has faced in the rural markets is to have a service set-up in the rural market, cost-effective distribution model, making hire purchase options available for rural consumers, and, finally, to promote the Philips brand in these markets.

Philips is planning to appoint new distributors exclusive for Vardaan range to improve its coverage of rural India from about 100 to 150 distributors.

As for after-sales-service, Philips plans to expand the service network by appointing franchise service centres in smaller towns as authorised service dealers. This programme is expected to start in the second quarter of 2005.