New Association to Focus on Rural India

Rural India is opening up to marketers, helped by the work of entrepreneurial, domestically-based technology companies offering villages affordable Internet connectivity. The newly formed Rural Marketing Agencies Association Of India (RMAAI) will promote and develop the sector through activities including syndicated research.

The Mumbai-based Association is the first of its kind, and combines the rural marketing divisions from agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, Lintas and Madison with rural marketing specialists like Impact Communications, MART and Rural Relations. Founder President R V Rajan of Anugrah Madison says the small ad spend allotted to the rural market is out of all proportion to the major proportion of revenues derived from it by some companies. Of a total Rs 11,000 crore (Rs 110bn or c.$2.5bn*) ad spend, only Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion or $110m*) was allotted to rural ads last year.

The Association's activities will include the development of benchmarks to measure return on investment on rural ad spends and marketing effectiveness, and the carrying out of syndicated research to help advertisers understand rural consumers. It will also offer specialised courses in rural marketing to management institutes.

The Indian rural market is said to be worth around Rs 125,000 crore (c.$28.6bn*) annually, of which FMCG accounts for about Rs 50,000 crore (c.$11bn) and consumer durables c. Rs 40,000 crore (c.$9bn*).

The organisation will host a rural marketing conference, scheduled for November 10-11 this year.

* Please note that dollar comparisons are based on today's exchange rates and are for interest only.

A crore is a commonly-used Indian term for 10 million - see http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Indian_numbering_system for other units including the lakh (100,000) and others considerably more obscure.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.