Going Rural with Kids
The case of childhood explorations in rural India
The challenge
As for many in the fast moving consumer goods category, the drive into moving towards rural consumer has become a key marketing effort. There was need to understand the standing of the current brands in the rural kids’ mind, and the efforts that should be made to move it up in the consumption hierarchy.
Deep diving into ‘difficult-to-open-up’ audience – kids, that too in a rural setting was the biggest challenge towards this task, and hence all the projective techniques applied into setting the mind free (against a caged respondent) were useful aids.
The approach
Mini group discussions with kids and youngsters spanning an age band of 8 yrs to 22 yrs were conducted across 3 large states of India: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. The villages selected had a population of 5,000 and the participants were regular confectionery consumers (specific brand and frequency maintained).
The output
With the local brands having a lot to offer in terms of price, variety, ease of availability and also high recall names – they were rampant in villages across the 3 states. All of them saw kids avidly purchasing local brands and in some cases preferring it too. The branded players fell short on all the above accounts. With regards to communication learning, simple storylines and humour is bestselling while animations is seen as kiddie, and alienate teenagers. Direct, on the face messages are best heard in this audience. Unconventional media works well as any small news is a talking point and creates publicity throughout village.