Rural Marketing Seminar: Regional media necessary to communicate with rural markets

Mumbai: K Srinivasan of Prime Point PR highlighted the need for implementing cutting edge regional media strategies as the next speaker for the day. Making the key point that all communication must be designed keeping in mind the audience, Srinivasan went on to dispel popular myths that many in the corporate world hold to be true, such as advertising in the Times of India would be superior to advertising in the Nav Bharat Times, and the urge to clone foreign media in their brand building endeavours. He said the need of the hour is to think local, and that for any rural marketing to make a headway, communication and advertising needs to reach the grassroot level to create a mass awareness.

Srinivasan outlined the strengths of regional media as:
Innovative (mass based)

• Low cost per contact as compared to English language media
• Financial publications in local languages
• Preference for local news over international news
• Linguistic affiliation is stronger in some parts of India, as can be seen by the presence of regional language television channels
• Comprehension of ads in local languages is better in rural markets
• Response mechanism is better in local languages
• Targeting of messages possible with local editions at micro levels
• Online readership for regional media is by choice

Srinivasan used Internet raking service Alexa numbers to illustrate the skew towards local and regional media in South India, as local and regional papers outpaced national English dailies in terms of online readership. He said that 50 to 70 per cent of traffic originating in India comes to regional media websites, and south India and Bengal have specially strong language affinities.

Srinivasan said that regional media is relatively more effective in the times of a crises, and that press release and advertising should be in local languages. He said corporate communications and marketers need to be sensitive to the concerns of the regional media.