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in and across product categories. In other words, identification of product adaptation is different in the rural marketing context from that of international marketing context. A way out for this challenge is to identify the commonalities among executives perceived rurality in rural markets and later understand adaptations within and across the commonalities. Rationale is provided below.

Rural is considered as a way of life that rests on people’s usage of social representations to create a specific kind of world (Halfacree, 1993, Halfacree, 1995, Pandey, 1996). Rural and its synonymous words and concepts are perceived, understood and used by people in everyday speech. More importantly they are shared in the respective social groups of people (Moscovici, 1984). Executives of business organisations who market their products and services in the rural markets form a social group and have their own perception of rurality. As individuals they would have continuously build their perceptions on ‘rural’ over the years and share with other executives either by social interactions or discourses (Similar to what Moscovici, 1984, Potter and Wetherell, 1987 and Wagner, 1993 argue how individuals of a social group share their representations). These perceptions enable them to comprehend and interpret the required for taking action (Jackson and Dutton, 1988, Argyris and Schon, 1998). If such range of perceptions are clustered and identified; product adaptation can be examined within and across these clusters. We can assume that different clusters of perception would also lead to different actions (in this case product adaptations).

DESIGN

The present study has the scope defined in the following points;

Only urban to rural market transactions are considered. Study did not consider rural to urban, rural to rural transactions.

Only products that are marketed in both rural and urban markets are considered i.e. those products which are marketed exclusively for rural markets are not considered.

Only four product categories are chosen for the study; viz. pharmaceuticals, financial products (banking and insurance), television and hair care. Number of product categories chosen for the study is few because of the cost and time implications.

Organisations marketing their products in rural markets of the state of Andhra Pradesh are studied. Choice of Andhra Pradesh is made for optimizing cost and time.

literature review was carried out initially as a part of the exploratory design. Later in the second stage, a pilot survey was conducted that included interviewing ten senior level marketing executives and fifteen middle and lower level executives for about 15 minutes. Executives were drawn from several industries that included soaps, telecom, dairy, banking, and hair care product categories. Interviews were unstructured and completely open ended. Interviews focused on how executives represent rural markets, what are the various dimensions of rurality in their operating rural markets and the nature of product adaptations in rural markets. A content analysis was done on the interview transcripts. Content analysis revealed that broadly, executives identified rural as; growing potential (25), increasing disposable income levels (22), economy driven by agriculture (20), low quality of infrastructure (15), more traditional and social status driven本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。