Marketing Campaign

Rural Marketing Effort by Colgate-

The Colgate Rural Initiative, targeted at rural areas with a population between thirty and a hundred thousand people, aimed at disseminating information and spreading the message of oral hygiene to children and their families in schools and rural centres. To this effect, Colgate conducted dental checkups in along with various activities at schools.

Charcoal, neem sticks, husk, salt and powder mixtures have been some of the traditional form of oral hygiene products used in rural India. But these products are losing favour, especially due to the efforts of many organizations and companies, foremost among them, Colgate. The company claims to have persuaded about 300 million people into using oral hygiene products in the country for the last 25 years.

Colgate decided to do this by controlling various advertising and promotional activities. Suggesting and implementing a rural promotional scheme was what Colgate called ‘Sampark’ for, as they were specialist in rural advertising category.

Sampark wanted something that had far and wide reach that is why Sampark decided to their advertising by door to door selling. Sampark hired people from a certain locality who knew the local language, jargons and idioms. This not only helped Colgate communicate easily with the consumer but was also effective in sending the right message across to the rural consumer, the other plus point of this message was that the communication gap was reduced to a large extend. These people would move about in the villages telling the people about the pros of using advanced oral care products and the cons involved in tradition oral care system, this was quite difficult as rural people always felt that natural was the best. Colgate trained these salesmen to convince the rural population and make them try the free sample that Colgate was distributing free.

The dental check up camps were supervised by teams of dentists and organisers who interacted with over 1 lakh...