Opportunities in Rural Management

Opportunities in Rural Management

 Rural Management is a term used to describe the kind of relations that a company or an organization establishes and maintains with the population in the rural areas.

The development of rural areas is shooting up in terms of rising total and disposable incomes, increasing consumption, buying power and as a fuse-box to balance the economic fluctuations in the country. Backed by favorable monsoons, this year the agricultural growth has surpassed the expected levels. This also means higher agricultural outputs, which are sold in the market to generate rural incomes.

When such a growth is being delivered by a society or a market classified as ‘rural’, an in-depth inquiry must be done so as to understand what can be the possible interpretations of the very word ‘rural’. Is it a set of population that are socially backward or economically handicapped? Or it comprises of villages made famous (or notorious) by Bollywood movies? A single answer to this question might be tough to be framed. Considering various definitions such as “areas comprising of less than 10000 population,” areas with limited infrastructural facilities” etc., one can only get a rough outlook of the same.

The primary issue arising now is that the rural environment is radically transforming. To define a rapidly changing environment it becomes all the more difficult. The change is happening from traditional outlook to a more modern outlook, with more of the rural population engaging in service industries and utilizing the latest technology in their daily lives. With extensive programs by the Government of India such as “Bharat Nirman”, pathways to development are very near to crowning. With national and international corporations setting up units in rural corners pan India, the ‘Bharat’ within India is adding to the world’s story.

For management graduates, rural markets act as a treasure chest. The reason being, an acute absence of efficient and effective managers to handle companies in lower tier cities and villages to facilitate business development. While companies are developing their channels to cut through the rural population to capitalize on their increasing buying power, professional human resource to aid the same is found to be in minimal numbers. Hence, this creates a wide opportunity for management graduates, business schools etc. to take up “Rural Management” as a major area of study and prospect.

Contributed by:

K. Akhil Anilkumar,

PGDM Rural Management 2013-15, WeSchool

Journey of Samvad !!!

The Marketing Guru- Philip Kotler

Contributed by: Chandni Tolaney (2012-2014), WeSchool

The most dreadful thing for the first year students was the 600 odd pages textbook of Philip Kotler.Although the Indian examples mentioned in the South Asian Perspective of the Kotler-Keller-Koshy-Jha were easy to relate to the concepts mentioned in the chapter.Philip Kotler (born 27 May 1931 in Chicago) is an American academic focused on marketing. The author of Marketing Management among dozens of other textbooks and books, he is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Marketing Students specifically read Marketing Management by Philip Kotler to understand the core nature of Marketing in Corporate terms.Today Kotler is considered to be the best Marketing mind in business world and his experiences in the form of booksare helping a lot of students to understand marketing better and in a more efficient manner. Also a lot of Professionals from Corporates and Professors take the lessons from Kotler’s books.

The most distinguishing fact about Philip Kotler is that he never won any degree in Marketing. He did his master’s from the University of Chicago and then did Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served different positions in Corporate before becoming a Marketing Professor in North Western University. His articles in ‘Financial Times’ and ‘New York daily’ are appreciated throughout the years and received an award in 1985 for distinguished Marketer of the year.

CRUX of Kotler

·   He always writes about Marketing as the primary activity of the Organization. Many Companies who use to concentrate on Manufacturing only, are focusing more on marketing to promote their Manufacturing.

• He gave more Importance to Customers than anything else in its books. Company’s focus needs to be on Customers rather anything on else.
• The most important thing here is that he separates the Marketing from Selling as large number of people use to think Marketing as same as Selling. The confusion was corrected by the examples which he put to clear the differences between both the terms.

Work of Mouth Publicity in Today's Era

Contributed by: Omkar Kelkar (2012-2014) , WeSchool

In today’s times, the entire world has come very close due to Internet and various social Media. It is now possible to connect with any individual quite easily irrespective of the geographical boundaries. Due to these developments, the word of mouth is increasingly becoming popular. Many times wesee Facebook posts such as “Which smartphone should I buy” and “Which college should I apply”. All the expert friends are very happy to answer the queries and they give their opinions which are very crucial in making a choice.In fact, some of them insist so much that we feel very convinced to accept their opinions without a second thought. Thus, word-of-mouth has now become words-on-Facebook.

Word of Mouth is increasingly becoming popular in products where we have little or no knowledge and in things where we feel it is very difficult to make a choice. The most common situations where word of mouth becomes important is especially when we buy electronic goods- we often get confused due to the large number of brands at a competing price. One option which we adopt is putting the question on social networking sites and getting the answer without much trouble. The second situation is mainly when we want to take important career decisions such as choosing a college or deciding when to do MBA. The main advantage of taking decisions based on word of mouth in these cases is that we have insufficient information and it makes sense to ask the people who have “been there and done that”. Experiences of others can be leveraged and shared to take appropriate decisions. Thus, the satisfaction level of a person will decide not only whether the company retains him as a customer but also determine how many people does he recommend. What is very important is that due to the advancement of social network, a person can influence decisions of large number of people unlike earlier days where word of mouth was only face-to-face. But now, imagine the impact of giving product reviews which hundreds of friends are reading and taking decisions based on that.

Other important applications which make use of the word of mouth are the e-commerce websites which not only describe the product, but lets users give reviews of them. Users can also give stars 1 to 5 for the product. This makes it very easy for new customers to make a choice. Also, the number of reviews is mentioned which help in determining the trend of how many people are buying the product. In fact many people have become so dependent on reviews that they don’t even think on their own and simply follow the reviews and make choices.Sites such as Goodreads.com help in deciding which book to read, tripadvisor.com gives recommendations on tours/trips, sites like imdb give movie reviews while some like glassdoorgive company/job reviews. So, the word of mouth in this case is not just limited to products but also has an impact on important decisions in life. Word of mouth has now become a part of almost all phases of life right from decisions of school admission up to investment of retirement corpus. And its influence has multiplied several times due to social networks.

While there are lots of advantages of word of mouth recommendations, there are some things which are negative. The decision making power of an individual has reduced and “herd mentality” has increased. People have become very lazy to try different things themselves and blindly follow the so-called experts who may misguide them in some instances. Also innovation is disappearing since people feel safer to follow the tried and tested path rather that doing something new which does not have word of mouth reviews.Word of mouth thus has to be certainly used for considering various opinions but should not be followed blindly so that it kills our creativity and increases dependence.

Image Source: flickriver.com

Adam Smith

Contributed by: Chandni Tolaney (2012-2014), WeSchool

He is the Scottish philosopher who is best known for his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Another famous work of this pioneer of political economy is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He was born on 5 June 1923 in OS Kirkcaldy, Scotland. He studied in one of the best secondary schools there till the age of 14 and later entered University of Glasgow and studied moral philosophy.

The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776,the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. This is the reason why no class of Economics goes without a mention of this book.Through reflection over the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the book touches upon broad topics as the division of labor, productivity and free markets.The book received splendid response and its first edition was sold out in the first six months.

Back in Edinburgh, Adam Smith moved in intellectual circles and gave a number of public lectures that brought him to the attention of the wider intellectual public such that at the age of twenty-eight he became Professor of Logic at Glasgow University in 1751. Shortly thereafter, in 1752, Adam Smith secured the more richly rewarded professorial chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

Some of the interesting facts about Adam Smith:

• ·         As a child he was always close to his mother and she was the one who motivated him to pursue his scholarly ambitions
• ·         He remained a bachelor his entire life
• ·         Smith was a reserved and absent minded individual much inclined to enjoy the books in his own library
• ·         In 1777 he was named lord rector of the University of Edinburgh and in 1778 was appointed as commissioner of customs in Scotland
• ·         During the latter part of his life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day
• ·         Smith has been commemorated in the UK on banknotes printed by two different banks, making him the first Scotsman to feature on an English banknote

On July 17th, 1790, Adam Smith died at Edinburgh; he was buried in the Canongate churchyard.