Are rural customers' different from urban and semi-urban customers? What distinguishes their consumer behavior? When someone looks at the kind of glossy and rosy presentations on the potential of India's rural markets, one can not help but get bemused. Why get bemused? It's for the simple reason that none of those presenters nor the people from whom these presenters would have got the information would have ever visited even one village and tried to find out for themselves as to what it is like living in a rural area? It's not to blame them though. Rather, it is to sensitize others to take those glossy presentations with a pinch of salt. When you are on a extrapolation, can that be called an exploratory study? And most of these estimates are extrapolations rather than based out of any valid and wholesome sample.
To understand rural consumers behavior, I have developed an exclusive model that we used it during GRAMDARSHAN, Aegis Global Academy's Rural Immersion Workshop in three different villages - Nanjagoundanpalayam, Vellalapalayam and Thottipalayam in Gobi (75 kilometres from Coimbatore).
Termed PYRAMIDS model, this is an intuitive model that we used for assessing rural consumers' behavior. It was good although it wasn't the best. Based on this model, the questionnaire was constructed and administered amongst 480 customers across 3 villages over 2 and half days and the behavior can largely be categorized into this model.
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