Product Adaptation for Rural Markets: A Social Relations Approach: An Abstract

Starting from a ‘dichotomous’ view i.e. to adapt or standardize in the early 1960s, the debate ended up as a consensus on a ‘continuum’ view in the late 1980s (Jain 1989) and continues to be the preferred approach (Hollender et al. 2017; Lages et al. 2008) even now. Such continuum perspective is based the contingent action required by the marketer after considering the differences in the determinants including market conditions. As per the contingency theory, organizations launch standardized products if they locate intermarket segments; well defined and similar cluster of customers identified on criteria across markets (Samiee and Roth 1992; Simmonds 1985; Shoham 1995). In case of absence of intermarket segments organizations prefer product adaptation. Broadly, product adaptation was researched till date in international marketing when segments are from multiple countries. What if the adaptation of products happens within segments of a country? This was the moot point of our enquiry in this paper. We elaborate on the specific case of the influence of rural and urban markets in a country. Does it mean that this paper is a mere adoption of the construct ‘product adaptation’ to a different context i.e. rural marketing? The answer is plain ‘no’. Reason being the complexity of the construct ‘rural’. In case of international marketing, irrespective of the segmentation variable, there is a definite geographical boundary that defines the guest and host segments. This is not the case with rural markets as rural has been arbitrarily conceptualized and there is no agreed way of operationalization by the industry and the researchers. Hence, issue of identifying the adaptation of products and aggregating at an industry level becomes difficult. Hence, we take a detour to understand product adaptation than the conventional approaches provided till date – a phenomenological route of understanding the difference between rural and urban markets using Social Relations approach grounded in the Theory of Social Representations (Moscovici 1993). We initially explored how marketers and sales managers understand rural markets to be different from urban markets. Later we explored how this understanding of the differences between rural and urban markets help marketers take decisions like product adaptation in rural markets. This novel approach is the significant contribution of this paper.