DEVELOPMENT OF A DISCRETE RURAL VERTICAL - A VALUABLE STRATEGY FOR CRAFTING RURAL MARKET DRIVEN ORGANISATION DESIGN

The enormous size of Indian rural market (83.3 crore rural customers approx. 12% of world population), its surging awareness and literacy level bestow a tremendous opportunity upon Indian and international players. But extensive research is required to uncover its potential as it typifies sundry cultures, customs, subcultures and languages (22 official languages) each with compound dialects. Further rural distribution (7.8 million retail outlets spread across 600000 villages) continues to be a great challenge for rural marketing crackerjacks and shape the chore of rural marketing even more intricate. Also, designing of rural products and promotion strategies need an unusual methodology, whose style is extremely different from their urban counterparts' strategy. As such, rural marketing entails long term investment, dedicated marketing efforts and rural-specific strategies. Crafting an explicitly rural market-driven organization design through configuration of a separate rural vertical is being increasingly considered as an important strategy by corporate giants like LG, HUL, Hero Moto Corp, Honda, etc. to realize its potential. This paper is an endeavor to appreciate the importance of building a separate rural business vertical, in order to make a successful rural market presence and bestow bucolic folks with superior customer value