It had been a while since I had
been sent out of a classroom… the last time this happened, I think It was in
the OOPs lab in 2008, well teachers wouldn’t get offended that easily in UVCE I
guess... anyway it was an interesting class of rural marketing and I seemed to
be interested, but sadly I was caught fiddling with the phone and making some
kinda tattoo on my hand and the teacher took offence at it and pushed me out of
the class. But what I was googling about was the Myths involved in Rural Marketing.
I’m not gonna bore you with what I found, heres a snap shot.
Something I remember from class
held my attention for a long time. The prof had said ‘One of the biggest myths
about rural marketing is that the marketers think we rural buyers don’t ask
many questions, they ask more questions than urban buyers, they are smarter
than the urban buyer. They sometimes ask questions that seem silly and make you
laugh, but we fail to find answers to such questions and that’s what makes
rural marketing more challenging.’
Yes, we’ve heard this being said a
lot of times. It’s almost a cliché. But something doesn’t fit right, does it? How
could rural buyers with less exposure and information about what’s happening be
harder to outsmart? Why would they be harder to sell to? Why do they ask harder
questions? Why are they tougher to convince? Do they know what we’re trying to
do from before? Not really. I like to call it, The Novice Poker Effect.
It happened roughly 2 years ago;
out of boredom I decided to teach my cousin how to play poker and tried to play
him a little. I couldn’t read him, I couldn’t bluff him, I thought he bluffed
when he played simple and I obviously lost. The reason is simple. A novice
poker player is not playing you, he is just playing his cards. It’s the same
with Rural Marketing, a rural buyer is just playing what’s on his cards, he isn’t
bothered about what or why a marketer is trying to sell.
We could conclude that a rural
buyer is not smart; he’s just like a novice poker player. Hard to read, hard to
pick up trends and hard to know what he wants. It’s this Novice Poker Effect
that makes us think a rural buyer is smart. If we understand that the rural buyer just looks at things from his side and dont try anything fancy against him, we would succeed.
So to round it up, learn to play
poker with a kid, maybe you’ll excel in rural marketing.
