AD Agencies
R Scape: Understanding the rural consumer
MUMBAI: Last year the broadcast and advertising industries woke up to the rural television audience with Broadcast Audience Research Council India’s rural inclusive data. Now, as several industry experts have been cited as saying that as the rural market has become extremely important for advertisers as it commands almost half of the total television viewership. Not to mention that with improved internet services and infrastructure in these areas, the need to understand how consumers behave differently in these pockets has become extremely important. Marketers have come to understand that a single brand communication may not work in both urban and rural markets.
With this understanding comes the awareness of how limited our knowledge is of the evolved rural consumers, and how badly marketers need to develop tools to address the change in the landscape.
Keeping that in mind, IIM-Ahmedabad, MaRS Monitoring and Research Systems, Decision Point and the Geometry Global I Encompass Network have done an extensive study of consumer behavior in the rural markets to help marketers come up with new strategies to address new challenges in rural marketing.
Called the R Scape, the study dashboard is able to generate category-level adoption, purchase and consumption-related insights based on inputs such as age, gender and region/ state.
R Scape covers 6,000 rural consumers with near equal split of married men, married women, young men, young women across eight states, which represent all regions across India and over 20 popular categories including 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 aata, shoe, denim, candy, seed, pesticide, banking, life insurance and mutual fund.
As per the study, the rural consumer segmentation needs to be a function of adherence to village norms and urban centricity, which has created strong differentiation among rural married women.
Moreover, rural consumers tend to exhibit lack of brand fidelity attitudinally as well as behaviorally. The biggest divide when it comes to urban and rural consumption is the reason for consumption itself. Hence, the same brand positioning or advertising does not work across both markets. Add to that that rural markets are not homogenous, therefore, reasons to buy and consume categories are often starkly different for consumers from different regions.
AD Agencies
The smell that told Mumbaikars which station was next
Tata AIA turns Mumbai’s Parle-G memory into a sharp, city-wise outdoor play
MUMBAI: When a biscuit factory became Mumbai’s unofficial station announcement. Long before smartphone maps and automated announcements, commuters on Mumbai’s Western line relied on their noses. As trains rolled into Vile Parle, compartments filled with the warm, sweet smell of baking biscuits from the Parle-G factory. It was a cue to gather bags, wake dozing children and shuffle towards the door.
Now that memory has been pressed into service by Tata AIA Life Insurance as part of its 25-year anniversary outdoor campaign — a city-by-city salute to the lived moments that shape urban life.
One hoarding, mounted close to the old factory site, reads: “We have been protecting Mumbaikars since Vile Parle smelled of freshly made biscuits.” Spare. Local. Loaded.
The broader campaign, rolled out across major metros, leans hard into contextual storytelling. In Kolkata, it nods to trams. In Pune, to Magarpatta’s transformation. In Bengaluru, to a time before IT parks. In Chennai, to OMR before it led to tech corridors. Each line anchors the brand’s longevity to a shared civic memory.
The Mumbai execution is the most evocative. For decades, the Parle-G factory was more than a production unit. It was a sensory landmark. Residents nearby set their clocks by the factory horn. Office-goers marked their commute by the waft of glucose and flour. When the plant shut, the city lost more than jobs. It lost a rhythm.
By placing the hoarding beside the former factory, the insurer collapses distance between copy and context. The site does half the storytelling. The rest comes from commuters who remember opening steel tiffins packed with Parle-G, or jolting awake as the train slowed.
It is a neat piece of brand positioning. Rather than trumpet balance sheets or policy counts, Tata AIA borrows emotional equity from the city itself. Twenty-five years becomes less a milestone and more a presence — steady, local, embedded.
Outdoor advertising is often a blunt instrument. This one is anything but. It whispers. It remembers. And in doing so, it sells trust without sounding like it is selling at all.
The scent may have faded. The memory has not.
