4 as of rural marketing

Awareness
The product which we selected that is cigarettes and Bidis have gained high awareness over time. We met various people of different age group ranging from 20 years to 65 years. The people possessed much knowledge about brands ranging from Gold Flake of ITC to Classic Regular also from ITC. We found people being aware of different brands. But we found very few numbers of shops selling high level brands. We found some observations from our talks with the people. Excerpts are: 1. The people of age group above 50 were those who are mostly retired and stays at home. They were the ones who majorly consumed Bidis instead of Cigarettes. The people of this group also had little affinity towards other means of smoking like Hookah. 2. The people of age group between 30-45 years were those working some in different companies and some in the village only in their fields. People having a job other than agriculture were the ones consumers of cigarettes brands like Navy Cut(ITC) and Capstan(ITC). 3. The people not having a job and work in their fields were consumers of Bidis mostly. 4. The people of age group between 20-30 were the ones very dynamic. We actually got confused about their affinity towards brands. Later we realized that this lot is the one who is in their starting phase of smoking so they were not much brand choosy as elders. They even smoked brands like Gold Flake and Classic and they also smoked local Bidis as per availability of money with them. These were some points regarding awareness of the cigarettes and bidis among people.

Acceptability
Cigarettes and bidis have high acceptability in the rural areas as it is supposed to be a muscularity proving product. The young people of age upto 30 years smoke because of showing their muscularity and elderly people smoke to show their ranking in their homes and the society as a whole. The other member of the family like wife and children are also not against these beliefs because they are always living under their superiority which makes them feel like whatever they will do it will not be bad. Another lot of ideological people have now grown up in the village who are against this habit. This lot is composed of educated people who have been working outside and returned after their retirement or those who have a good level of education and understand the killing effects of smoking. These people often share the effects of smoking with smokers and try to make them quit smoking.

But we watching on an average level found that there are large number of people who smoke in the village and found that the only reason behind this is the lack of awareness regarding the drawbacks of smoking. They are also to be taught that Smoking is Injurious to Health.