Swati Sucharita
Research Scholar
Department of Home Science
Institute of Science
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi — 221005 (U.P.)
Indira Bishnoi
Professor
Department of Home Science
Institute of Science
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi — 221005 (U.P.)
Abstract
The condition of women in a given society represents the condition of the society itself. If a society is to be developed, the condition of women in that society also needs to be developed. The Self-help Groups (SHGs) have played great role in uplifting the rural women directly and the rural population indirectly as the empowerment of women leads to upliftment of the whole family. Despite of all the good efforts of the SHGs, the marketing problem remains as a prominent one faced by many SHGs. To understand the cause of marketing problem it is necessary to understand the marketing strategy used by the SHGs. Keeping this in mind the present study was designed to study the marketing strategy used by the SHGs in Ranapur block of Odisha. It was found that majority (80.5%) of the respondents were marketing their product in local shops. In case of managing competition, majority (89.8%) of the respondents focused on maintaining the quality of the product. In case of product packaging, majority of the respondents (79.9%) were packing their product and mostly used polythene bags (89.5%) for packing. It was also found that majority of the respondents were not branding and labelling their product and did not used any type of advertising for promoting their product as all these added extra cost to the product. The marketing strategy score was calculated and accordingly the SHGs were classified from very good to poor category. It was found that the marketing strategy of majority (47%) of the SHG was average, followed by good (26.4%) and poor (20.6%). Very few SHGs (6%) had very good marketing strategy. This means that the marketing strategy of the SHGs needs improvement.
Key words: Marketing Strategy, Rural women, SHG, Upliftment.
