Rural Marketing: Targeting the Non-Urban Consumer

Sanal Kumar Velayudhan is Professor in the Area of Marketing, at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. He is also Fellow, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He began his career in 1977 as faculty member in the Department of Business Management at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He then had a stint in marketing, and as a senior executive in a bank. He was Associate Professor at Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, from 1991 to 1997; worked at the Centre for Management Development, Thiruvananthapuram from 1977–1998; and was professor and Area Chairman, Marketing at the Administrative Staff College of India from 1998 to 2007. 

Professor Velayudhan has designed and directed training programmes in general management and in marketing, besides teaching post-graduate programmes at XLRI. He also taught as visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; MDI, Gurgaon, and BITS Pilani. He has handled marketing assignments for centre and state level public sector units, banks and also in the cooperative sector in the areas of product line decisions, product positioning, customer satisfaction and service quality studies, evaluation of new service products, among others. 

His research interests include communication and diffusion, rural markets, small business marketing, product management and marketing of services. He has authored many papers in the areas of rural marketing, brand management, and small business marketing and strategy. Some of his articles were published in Journal of Small Business Economics, Asian Case Research Journal and Energy Policy.