RRA of HAAT: Revisiting Rural India's Periodic Markets

Abstract

Serving the remote rural consumers of the emerging economies like India have always been a challenge for marketers. Similarly, researchers have often found that the conventional tools used in the urban areas are not easily adaptable to the rural context. Growing importance of the emerging markets in general and their rural segment requires marketers and researchers to use innovative research tools that would help them to understand the rural markets in an effective manner. Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) is one such tool that can help the marketers in such endeavours. This tool has evolved over time and has recently attracted the attention of rural market researchers. This tool, until now, has largely been used by the non-profit sector to study the needs of the beneficiaries’ and to explore non-explicit barriers to social projects’. In this paper we report how this tool was adopted to study a traditional periodic rural markets – Haats. Then we briefly discus how the findings of such studies may help marketers to develop appropriate marketing strategies to efficiently reach the rural consumers.