Rural Marketing Programmes: Growing the Pie, or Pie in the sky?

First, acknowledgments. This topic was given by Ms. Deepti Potnis, budding consultant, as a sample of her spectacular skills at delivering customised solutions to undeserving petitioners. No, seriously, she gives good solutions. And her blog is not too bad either. Visit it here. Now that my mandatory commercial is done, back to the topic!
Rural Marketing and products for rural markets are wonderful things for companies. For one thing, everyone insists that you just cannot ignore a market of close to 600 million people. It has to be profitable surely!
Another reason is the wonderful idea that companies are socially responsible if they bring out products for the Indian rural chap. After all, by doing this favour, they manage to educate the rural masses about the world outside, which is a great thing after all!
It cannot be denied that 600 million people is one huge market opportunity. At the same time, if it was so easy to crack the market, it should have been cracked already. And strangely enough, it has been opened up, and for a long time too. Many people have ooohed and aaahed over Hindustan Lever's (Now Hindustan Unilever) amazing distribution network. But the fact of the matter is that if the largest FMCG player in India is actually ITC, with its cigarettes available across the length and breadth of the country (of course, cigarettes are not an FMCG product, don't ask me why).
Coca Cola and HUL have certainly done a fantastic job of opening up the rural markets. HUL's project Shakthi has been an unqualified success, as has the chota coke campaign of the soft drink maker. But these amazing successes have not come free. Coca Cola spent a decade in India before it could make the rural breakthrough. And HUL has been around for donkeys years. And something is interesting about both of these companies. Neither have really brought out separate products for the rural markets. In the case of Coca Cola, it was a case of reducing the unit quantity and thereby the price, while for HUL, it was more of a distribution chain improvement.
Kotler has 4 P's, which are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. This brings me to my point. Rural marketing seems to essentially be a problem of price and Place(distribution). Promotion in the cable connected and aware rural markets does not really seem a huge problem. And products designed for the Urban market seem to do decently in rural India as well. Perhaps the Urban rural divide is not as large as most people believe it to be. The problem for most companies is that Product and Promotion is strangely enough, the easiest to redo or remake. Cost competencies which affect Price, and Distribution and supply chains, which make Place irrelevant are far more difficult to obtain. They take experience, and initial investment.
So simply put, I think it is fair to say that unless companies get their cost and distribution act together, that beautiful rural market is going to remain a mirage, or a pie in the sky. The companies that have successful products will have to find that most difficult of things; an efficient distribution system, in order to ensure that they grow the pie! Or else, they will just end up eating Humble pie.
Well, that is it for this post. More management topics are invited, cause I am running out of too many cool new ideas. I promise credits for all topic submitters!

Japanese Money Back Policies

Well, this is not a strictly economic post, but this was so weird that I just had to put it out. Apparently, people in Japan are scrupulously honest when it comes down to cash...and they have lots of rich people with too much of it too.
Some people have been busy putting envelopes of 10000 Yen in public toilets for people to take away. And the dumb jocks have been returning it!
Ditto with money raining down from the sky. Someone rained a 100 banknotes down near a mall....all 100 were returned.
So what does this say about Japan? That they are scrupulously honest? Give me a break...They are only as honest as the next guy is. But they do live in a society with far more surveillance than most others. After all, its a small place, and when every other Tom, Dick, Harry, or Nakamura has a mobile camera along, you really don't want to look like a fool. Even if the cost of it is money going waste. Besides, they could then be parodied on YouTube, and maybe a manga would be made of them!
You know the worst thing about the money though. If no one claims it (and it is not likely they will), it will go into the public funds. That is why it prompted some Jap Wiseguy to say, "It must have been a foreigner wot threw all that cash away. Which Japanese person would give his money to the government voluntarily. Cause every Japanese person knows about Japanese and money found on the street!"
Find the full story here

50th Post....And hiring Teams

Blogger tells me that this is my 50th post on the blog....by Jove...it looks like this has lasted a lot longer than most! So, here is to many more posts to come!
Now back to management stuff! I was talking to a friend on GTalk, who was cribbing about the lack of personal interaction and friends at work. I was of course, doing much of the same as well, when she came up with quite a great idea.
She asked why companies don't hire in teams of 3-6 people, all of whom are friends and have experience working in a team with each other. I thought of half a dozen reasons why not, but they all fundamentally boiled down to, "well, we have not done it before!"
Consider this. Companies make a huge hue and cry about how its teams that are important today rather than individuals. And yet, they go around busily hiring individuals, and then mashing them up into teams willy-nilly as and when needed. It makes little sense. Instead, why not try hiring a group of 4-6 people, say those who have done a project together and who get along with each other, and then see how the team goes.
I am certain that such a team would clearly outperform a team of strangers. Your strengths and weaknesses are all known, and every person in the team would be having far more effective for that knowledge. And as a handy advantage, they can play together, as well as work together. All in all, a company would be pretty well off with that.
So, I guess I should jot this off to a nearby HR head of a large IT company and see what they think of it. I am sure they will think up a million objections. But it would be worth a shot, would it not?