The marketer who has been grappling in trying to understand who and what the rural consumer is all about may just have some help coming from the recently launched study ‘R|Scape’ that hopes to understand the elusive and yet the ubiquitous rural consumer and his behaviour. The study has been jointly undertaken and launched by Geometry Global- Encompass Network along with IIM-Ahmedabad, MaRs and Decision Point. While MaRS Monitoring and Research Systems is a full service research agency set up by former CEO of MARG Raghu Roy, Decision Point is a specialized consumer and retail analytics firm based in Gurgaon and founded by Ravi Shankar.

The ambitious research-study covers 6,000 rural consumers (near equal split of married men, married women, young men, young women), eight states (representative of all regions across India) and over 20 popular categories (deodorant, shampoo, hair oil, lipstick, toothpaste, talcum powder, shaving cream, after-shave lotion, cooking oil, toilet soap, fairness cream, detergent, utensil cleaner, floor cleaner, biscuit, tomato sauce, butter, jam, breakfast cereal, branded atta, shoe, denim, candy, seed, pesticide, banking, life insurance, mutual fund).

According to Rahul Saigal, Group COO, Geometry Global Encompass Network, “While everyone knows that rural consumers need to be treated or targeted differently, yet nobody’s doing much about it. Also, the smartphone phone penetration is reaching threshold levels and could become a potentially strong medium to serve personalised content.”

The study is relevant in the backdrop of the evolving rural consumer whose behaviour has been changing dramatically in the last few years thus underlying the need for him to be better understood by the marketer, media planner and the advertiser. The study hopes to help marketers transition smoothly from market to message and media as also help assess the differences between the rural and the urban consumer so that the brand positioning and advertising can be crafted accordingly and suitably.

Some of the top findings from the study include:

1) The rural consumer segmentation needs to be a function of adherence to village norms and urban centricity.

2) By-and-large, rural consumers are exhibiting lack of brand fidelity attitudinally as well as behaviorally.

3) Adherence to village social norms has created strong differentiation among rural married women.

4) Reasons for adoption and consumption of categories are very different for rural and urban consumers. Hence, the same brand positioning or advertising does not work across both markets.

5) Rural markets are not homogenous. Reasons to buy and consume categories are often starkly different for consumers from different regions.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.