Rural Telecom in India: Marketing Issues and Experiences from other countries

Rural markets are an important and growing market for most products and services including telecom. The characteristics of the market in terms of low and spread out population and limited purchasing power make it a difficult market to capture. The Bottom of the pyramid marketing strategies and the 4 A's model of Availability, Affordability, Acceptability and Awareness provide us with a means of developing appropriate strategies to tackle the marketing issues for marketing telecom services in rural areas. Successful cases like the Grameen Phone in Bangladesh and Smart Communications Inc in Philippines also provide us with some guidelines to tackling the issue