Advertising in Rural India: Language, Marketing Communication and Consumerism (review)

The growing economic power of India in the last quarter century has established its over 600,000 rural villages (containing over 80% of the country’s population) as a tremendous potential consumer market. In this intriguing book, Tej K. Bhatia examines marketing communication in rural India. He reports on his 1997 research investigating wall advertisements; videotapes of live performances; data from films, television commercials, and radio commercials from All-India radio; and a small set of interviews and questionnaire responses.

One focus of the book is informative, providing information about advertising in rural India. Another focus is on modeling the process by which commercial products, services, and social ideas are promoted to a largely rural and linguistically diverse population. The ten chapters introduce the background of Indian demographics (linguistic, ethnic, and religious) and media, survey the range of marketing approaches in existence and the dynamics between urban and rural marketing, and discuss various linguistic principles, communication theories, and advertising models (providing in the end some guidelines for advertisers). In addition, B provides five appendixes which document his research questionnaire and qualitative responses, provide a list of India’s major corporations (both national and multinational), summarize economic indicators such as per capita income, and give a list of rural festivals and folk performances. The book is also richly illustrated with about 50 plates from photographs taken by the author and includes extensive references and subject and name indexes.

The opening of the book provides an excellent overview of the current economic situation in India and on rural markets. Specific types of marketing discussed include conventional media such as radio, television, and print, and nonconventional media like wall art (billboards on walls) calendars, street theatre, rural festivals, puppetry, and video vans (a unique form of communal viewing in which vans travel to rural locations to play videos and deliver advertising). Included are case studies on the making of rural advertisements and a focus on social and developmental messages such as the universal immunization campaign of the 1980s. There is also a good deal of material on use of language in advertising and on theories of advertising, communication, and language, though perhaps some of the introductory material could have been condensed. Chapters of special interest include those on ‘Imaging and imagining women’ (239–65) and on ‘Religion and advertising’ (267–84). The former deals with both the appeal to women as consumers and the appeal using women as objects, pointing out the diverse roles of women in Indian society and their increasing economic power and also documenting the imaging of women in calendar advertising for a range of products from liquor to wedding cards. The chapter on religion notes, among other things, the popularity of religious films and serials (produced by the Indian film industry in Bollywood) and the use of Hindu gods in various sorts of advertisements. The chapter on ‘Advertising communication and language’ (97–126) covers both communication theories and basic linguistic concepts (semantics, information processing, modality, pragmatics, ellipsis, indefiniteness) in brief.

Advertising in rural India will, I think, be of interest to readers of Language who are curious about how communication and language work in the marketplace and how marketing affects linguistic and social structure. Reading B’s book, I could not help speculating on what similar research on rural marketing and advertising in the US would show—what we could learn from looking at changes in demographics and buying power; at the role of small town newspapers, newspapers, broadcasters, and the internet; and at the replacement of small businesses (shops, farms, media outlets) by larger chains. It is likely there is a book to be written about language and rural advertising in the United States as well.