Challenges of Rural Marketing in India

The rural market has been growing steadily over the past few years and is now even bigger than the urban market. About 70 per cent of India‟s population lives in villages. More than 800million people live in villages of India. „Go rural‟ is the marketer‟s new slogan. Indian marketers as well as multinationals, such as Colgate-Palmolive, Godrej and Hindustan Lever have focused on rural markets. Entrepreneurship in rural areas is finding a unique combination of resources, from agriculture. This can be achieved only through the base of a farm business to include all the non-agricultural uses that available resources can be put to or through any major changes in land use or level of production other than those only depend on Agriculture. Unfortunately the economic growth of the country continue to be limited by the general constraints of the small business sector, due to challenges of skills like managerial skills, lack of global competition and the weak entrepreneurial performance. The primary objective of the study is to find out the influence of selected challenges on the perceived success of entrepreneurship and small businesses present in rural areas. The study was conducted by using the quantitative technique with main focus to identify the challenges for Marketing. Although agriculture today provides income to rural Peoples, rural development is increasingly liked to enterprise development. Since national economies are get more globalized and competition is high at an unprecedented pace, affecting not only industry but any economic activity including agriculture, it is not surprising that rural Marketing is gaining in its importance as a force of economic change that must take place if many rural communities are to survive.