To help rural marketers develop market strategy for the agrarian sector in India, MICA, has launched MICA Village Market Intelligence (MVMI), a tool that includes the data of over six lakh villages.
With the help of MVMI, companies can reduce market research costs and make informed strategic marketing decisions to promote any product or service, as per the region.
MVMI has been launched under the existing MICA Indian marketing intelligence (MIMI), a tool with a strong conceptual foundation and a robust research methodology that provides a marketer with data on socio-economic variables of 630 districts — all with a single click.
MIMI provides the secondary data for socio-economic variables and market intelligence up to district level for all the States and Union Territories of India. Built around a unique data-fusion algorithm developed by researchers and analytical minds of MICA, MIMI fuses the variety of structured information, compiled from authentic sources, to provide a market-view. It also provides market potential index (MPI), composite scores and other data, in separate views for rural, urban, and the total Indian market, for 630 districts.
Open knowledge, data sharing
The team that worked on the project include Dr Rajneesh Krishna, Dr Vina Vani, Dr Shailesh Yagnik, Dr Sunita Mall, Dr Viral Nagori, and Rooshabhkumar Mehta.
Speaking about the same, Dr Shailendra Raj Mehta, President and Director, MICA, said, “The existing MIMI provides reliable data clubbed with market prioritisation tools to understand the diverse and multi-faceted Indian markets better. It helps marketers analyse the markets, enhance their penetration and design marketing strategies to have an edge over their competitors.”
Dr Preeti Shroff, Dean, MICA, said, “The launch of MVMI will contribute to data driven strategic research for academic, industry, government and social sectors. Open knowledge and data sharing is a priority at MICA as we continue to strengthen global and cross-sector learning collaborations.”
“Villages are listed according to their districts for all 35 states and union territories. Rural Market Potential Index given in MIMI is also included to help a marketer for selecting districts. Having selected a district, one can select villages and access relevant village-level data to make informed strategic marketing decisions to promote any product or services,” said Dr Shailesh Yagnik, one of the team members who worked on the project.
Rigorous analytic techniques
Prof Rajneesh Krishna said, “The biggest challenge was to gather the data and make it more relevant for anyone to use it. The tool can be used by researchers, consultants, entrepreneurs, academicians and students to get a better understanding of markets and their potential across villages of India.”
MIMI is presently subscribed by almost all IIMs, a few brands, and educational institutes.
“Our next step would be to rate all districts into most socially developed districts and less developed districts. We will also be looking at ways and means to make this tool available at no cost for school children so that they can make the best of it,” Prof Krishna said.
Dr Vina Vani, one of the team members said, “The MPI has been developed based on rigorous analytic techniques and data cleansing processes. Hence it makes it a very powerful rural marketing tool as it does not involve sampling or projection but based on actual data.”