Rural India is not a smaller version of the urban plan

A rural plan built by scaling down an urban one usually clears its reach and frequency targets and fails anyway. The failure is not in the delivery. It is in who the plan thinks is deciding.

The purchase is a household conversation

For most of the categories that matter here — agricultural inputs, financial products, durables, health — the purchase is discussed before it is made, often across two generations and usually involving somebody who was not in the target audience. An urban plan can get away with addressing the buyer. A rural plan that does the same is arguing with one participant in a conversation it never hears.

That is why the message has to survive being retold. If it cannot be repeated accurately by somebody who saw it once, at the door, to somebody who did not see it at all, it will not travel the last three metres.

What that changes in practice

• Write for retelling. One claim, concrete, repeatable in a sentence. Not three benefits and a line.
• Plan vernacular radio and local print as primary rather than as top-up. They reach the household, not the individual.
• Put a person at the last step. Enrolment, application and first purchase in these categories complete with somebody at a desk, and the plan that stops at awareness has stopped one step early.
• Buy by block, not by state. The variance inside a state is routinely larger than the variance between states.

— Span Media Communications, New Delhi