Establishing Multidisciplinary Innovation & Development Centre (MIDC) eco-system has its unique significance for Manipal University. MIDC will bring together various platforms with the help of industry partners and with educational institutes.
The success of a brand in the Indian rural market is highly unpredictable. Our nation is classified into approximately 450 districts and 630000 villages, which can be differentiated by parameters such as literacy levels, accessibility, income levels, penetration, distances from nearest towns, etc. Many brands, which should have been successful, have failed miserably. More often than not, people attribute rural market success to luck. Therefore, marketers need to understand the social dynamics and attitude variations within each village though nationally it follows a consistent pattern.
Despite lower incidence of premium product purchases, the rural consumers across all income segments exhibit marked propensity to spend on premium high quality products, which are backed by strong brand values, where they correspond to their own aspirations and quality needs. The problem really lies in market not being able to offer a premium product in the specific context of rural demand. The Indian rural market is a complex mosaic of mind-sets, cultures, and lifestyles. While education, employment, income, agricultural land ownership may still be the major deciding factors accounting for social differentiation, they do not yield reciprocal cohort behavioral patterns with respect to consumption patterns, purchasing decisions and priorities of product ownership. Rural markets represent a distinct dynamic in how they come into being and make unique demands on how the product is designed and how the brand is positioned and promoted. Greater the strategic attention to these unique demands, greater are the chances of the product's success in the rural market.