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!

Strategic HR--That elusive creature

Human Resource in every company is much vilified. It is claimed (sometimes justifiably) that they are useful only for 3 things, recruitment, payroll, and vilification.
But todays HR professionals feel that they are being short changed. In the party where the marketing guys ruled, and the finance guys were feted, the poor HR fellows looked a little bit out of place, standing at one corner, dipping into the drinks cabinet now and then.
Times had to change, and suddenly a divine light dawned....and the enlightened HR professional came up with the golden words, and it was called "Strategic HR".
HR guys suffered from quite an inferiority complex. Whenever a fin guy was asked to deliver his results, he could say, hey i lowered your debts by 90%, and saved you a tonne of cash. And marketing, "Heck, where would you be without your star who got you 50 new clients?". But poor HR..."Sir, I hired 2500 new employees who are going to cost you Rs100 crores....and most of them will leave by next week." Not guaranteed to bring a smile to that CEO's face.
Strategic HR tried to turn things on its head. It said, "Phsaw...these balance sheets are all past data. and all those sales happened yesterday. Our stock prices depend on tomorrow...and for that, we need future growth."
And of course, future growth was measured by whether you had the right people doing the right job, at the right time, at the right place. This was strategic HR's idea. To pick the best people for the best job at the right time. And all this would be based upon a company's nebulous vision and mission statement.
Today's HR profs and executives are big believers in Strategic HR. Whether it works is still a matter of conjecture.
Mind you, I do not denigrate HR. Any company with Bad HR is doomed to devastation and ruin. But I am just a little bit suspicious about Strategic HR. Its fine in theory. But in practice, it frequently means work...which no one likes doing.