Rural Market Research: Challenges and Methodologies. | Kadence

India is a diverse country with 29 States and seven Union Territories covering more than 600 districts, roughly 8,000 towns, and more than 0.6 million villages. The villages are spread over 3.2 million square kilometers supporting 65 percent of India’s total population. There is vast heterogeneity in population characteristics due to socio-cultural factors, caste-based divisions, and religious and linguistic diversity. 

Specifically, in the Indian context, ensuring data capturing and research methodologies are amenable to different languages, literacy levels, and differentiated access/familiarity with the internet is critical. 

For the above reasons, research and data collection become a challenging task and call for a robust and representative methodology to mirror India’s diversity.

Key Challenges in Research & Data Collection

Given India’s cultural and geographical diversity, some of the critical challenges for marketers and researchers in designing a survey for rural India are listed below:

1. Reach: As per Census 2011, nearly 58 percent of India’s rural population resides in 115,080 villages having a population of 2000+. This effectively means that roughly 80 percent of the total villages in India are small or very small in size, inhabiting less than 2000 people. Tapping rural markets, and last mile connectivity with end consumers is a big challenge for Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) players. Similarly, reaching the vast network of 33 million retail outlets in rural India is a challenge for companies, given the high distribution costs. Therefore, focused, and targeted reach is a priority in accessing rural markets. The survey design needs to account for this critical consideration when designing the scope of research and sampling methodology.  
2. Commercial Viability: It is estimated that 85,000 large villages in India account for 40 percent of the total population and 60 percent of the total consumption of FMCG categories. The skewness in demographic profile and purchasing power further limits the scope to cover the whole of Rural India for reasons of commercial viability. 
3. High degree of heterogeneity: “A one size fits all approach” does not work well when designing a survey or methodology for rural India. For example, poor and backward states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh have more than 75-80 percent of their total population living in rural areas, whereas urbanized States like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Telangana and more equitable in terms of distribution. Therefore, each state has its unique demographic and socio-cultural profile, which must be kept in mind while designing the sampling methodology in any primary research survey. 
4. Gender Inclusivity: Females are vital consumers and influencers of product categories in Rural India, but men are likely to be key purchasers. Therefore, “whom to interview” becomes a pivotal question to answer while designing a survey. 
5. Linguistic Diversity: India has 22 official languages besides numerous local languages, dialects, and colloquial words. Therefore, linguistic compatibility becomes essential for survey administration in Rural India. 

 Methodologies for Rural Research 

Some factors merit consideration while designing a methodology representative of the diversity of Rural India and are listed below:

1. Regional Representation
2. Adequacy of Sample Size
3. Defining “Rural” and therefore a selection of villages 
4. Other Imperatives

Regional Representation 

In a vast and diverse country like India, robustly researching rural consumers requires reflecting heterogeneity and ensuring representativeness. For example, people in the North have attitudes and behaviors that are distinctly different from the population in the South. Similarly, other regions also have socio-cultural nuances that often color their opinions and attitudes, especially on sensitive issues. 

Therefore, selecting Socio-Cultural Regions or SCR-s is often the starting point to decoding rural consumer behavior. The regions make it easier to contextualize people and their behavior for prevalent agrarian practices, social and cultural nuances, and crop-season-driven income and consumption patterns. 

Adequacy of Sample 

The population spread for different States in India varies a lot. For example, the most populous State, Uttar Pradesh, accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s population. On the other hand, the tiny State of Goa accounts for less than 0.5 percent of India’s population. Therefore, in a pan-India or multi-state survey, stratification of a sample by State becomes essential. Generally, states are categorized into different population bands such as high population states, medium population states, and low population states. The sample is then fixed for each band in terms of their population size to ensure adequate representativeness. 

The sample size would also depend on other factors such as the granularity of data required within a state, and heterogeneity of population characteristics within a state.  

Defining Rural 

The Census of India defines a rural village as a settlement that has the following three characteristics:

• A population of fewer than 5,000 people
• Less than 75 percent of the male population is employed in non-agricultural activities and 
• Population density of fewer than 400 people per square kilometer

However, for commercial purposes, this vast area coverage is logistically challenging to cover for any marketing company. Therefore, for practicality and feasibility, different definitions of rural are followed. For most companies, the “hub and spoke model” defines rural coverage as mapped to their distribution channels. They consider villages in the immediate vicinity or within a defined radius of the feeder towns. Last mile connectivity is a challenge for most companies in Rural India. Covering interior or remote parts of rural is not considered to be a viable option. Villages at the periphery of small towns/feeder towns that can be accessed easily become the “immediate” potential for targeting Rural India. This is also called the “Ringing Method” of village selection. 

The above has a profound implication for researchers in terms of designing a suitable methodology and, more importantly, for deciding on an appropriate sampling methodology for the research.  

Other Imperatives: There are a few other imperatives that one must be cognizant of while designing rural research methodologies: 

• Permissions: Before any fieldwork in villages starts, it is crucial to approach the village head called the “Sarpanch” to apprise them of the survey and its objectives and take approval to conduct fieldwork. This is a formal authorization from the village head that they have been informed about the study and grant their formal permission. 
• Village Map: You are required to draw a rough map of the village before the start of fieldwork to understand the village’s layout and the critical physical structures —like the hospital, school, panchayat office, temple, or any other place of worship. The team supervisor generally does this exercise with the help of a local person from the village, such as the sarpanch/ schoolteacher or any other elderly person. As the rural dwellings/ households in a village are not structured or follow a pattern (unlike the urban dwellings), the maps also help sample and select clusters/households in that village. 
• Use of colloquial terms: Given the linguistic diversity of Indian States, specific phrases or words have colloquial interpretations. Therefore, for ease of understanding and comprehension of questions by the respondents, it is generally recommended that local phraseology is inserted into the instrument basis inputs from an informed local person such as the schoolteacher. 

With the focus of multinational companies and marketers now shifting to rural consumers, rural market research in India will likely increase spending in the near future. It augurs well for market research companies to actualize this opportunity to sharpen their research methodologies with rural consumers in mind. At the same time, researchers should be mindful of some of the challenges of rural research, such as low literacy levels, low tech savviness, poor connectivity, and a heterogeneous population, while designing research methodologies for this group. 

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