No one could miss Sukraat Singh's appearance. He sure looked bronzed from his recent journeys deep into India's hinterland. But what his colleagues noticed most about the CEO of Archimedia Ltd was his manner. Specifically, the way he had taken to long silences, his eyebrows knit, his gaze unblinking, his hand to his chin.

Had it been such an awesome experience? Singh's team of three executive directors wondered. Project Inner Force had started off a couple of years ago as a minor experiment in micro-credit marketing in rural India. Archimedia's primary idea was to deepen the FMCG marketer's rural penetration. There was not much leverage sought from the initiative, and certainly no plan to effect any major change in market dynamics.

Yet, the project's success had been so compelling that the CEO himself had decided to spend a week with the company's rural forces, particularly those that had ventured into the so-called 'media-dark' territory. Yes, India had more than 38 million TVs in rural India, of which 13 million were cable & satellite (C&S) linked. But the challenge was in going after the rest. Of the 700 million people in India's 700,000 villages, a sizeable fraction was still not using any Archimedia products at all.

"The immediate benefit, I guess," said Jeev Reddy, executive director, "is that we can get out of the sachet mindset. We can relieve ourselves of the pressure to keep reducing pack sizes and 'price points' to lift non-users into the market."

"Yes," responded T.N. Dev, another executive director, "Small pack sizes are not just a pain in the neck for us, they are a raw deal for the consumer, eventually. Instead of adapting our packs to the cash-in-wallet realities of low and daily-wage earners, we can now work on the cash-in-wallet realities to enable the purchase of larger packs."

"From the data we have," said Rajan Subramanian, the third executive director, "our micro-credit scheme is working well, especially with women. They just have to hear stories of how their neighbour managed to buy something chunky, and that's it-they want to join a self-help group."

The basic idea was simple. A group of women would get together periodically to put, say, Rs 10 each, into a common pool. And then they would hand over the entire sum to a single member to make a big purchase. And this would be done turn by turn (with the order determined by a draw of lots). Presto-a primitive form of banking, based on group cohesion and mutual trust.

What Archimedia was doing, however, was slightly more advanced-with rural NGOs and financial institutions roped in to mobilise people and inject the system with an added dose of liquidity. Also, the very presence of the company was job-generating in its own way. Locals, for instance, were being encouraged to take up independent distributorships. The real goal, as the CEO had said over and over again, was mass rural empowerment, no less.

"The plan is working to perfection," added Subramanian, belting out a set of statistics.

"Sounds terrific," said Dev, "getting a micro-credit advance of Rs 2,000 is quite a big deal out there. And with local operating costs so low, some of these locals are doing business of more than Rs 15,000 a month. That's enough to leave them with nearly Rs 1,000 in profit-which is darned good in purchasing power terms."

Sukraat Singh didn't stir. He sat there in much the same pose, listening. Or so they thought. They couldn't tell for sure. The statistics couldn't be bothering him. The CEO had expressed his satisfaction with these just the other day. Nor could the expansion plan. With some 5,000 self-help groups already in operation across some 5,000 villages, the plan was to multiply the project's reach rapidly. On this, there was no argument.

Was there something else?

"The good part," said Subramanian, trying to elicit a comment from the chief, "is that the villages just can't stop talking about self-help groups. Many of these people are getting acquainted with banking for the very first time. Just the learning has stirred up so much excitement. People are discovering things about our products that they had no clue about."

The enticement worked. "Oh, are they?" asked Singh, almost startling the other three.

"Well, to the extent possible under the circumstances," replied Subramanian, tentatively.

By now, the three had begun to figure out Singh's concerns. Regular urban mass marketing was far easier, they knew, at least to the extent of keeping the persuasion tools within the well-defined parameters of the company. Project Inner Force, however, was well-structured only as a financial system, leaving space for a lot of vagueness and Brownian motion in the actual process of product adoption by rural consumers.

"We shouldn't end up creating infrastructure merely for rivals to come and take advantage of," said Singh, "that's all."

"But we are the rural pioneers," objected Reddy.

"That's irrelevant," said Singh, "We cannot operate under the assumption of a rural monopoly. If we don't inseminate this market with brand value fast enough, we could lose the investment."

"But," ventured Reddy again, "our brand teams are involved in the project..."

"No, not intimately enough," said Singh, "and you know what?"

This was it, sensed his three colleagues. The reason they were all sitting in his office in the first place. Singh would finally let on what had struck him hardest on his rural sojourn.

"I met this middle-aged woman who wanted to know why we had all these colourful wrappers for our products-when everyone knows they must be discarded, and it's the actual usage that delivers the quality-of-life increments. I told her about the practical aspects-product integrity, aroma preservation, transportation and so on-and she just nodded along. But when I started talking about brand identity, she had question after question. And, boy, better than any B-school session I've attended. And you know what? It's a huge myth that the rural consumer has a commodity mindset."

"Interesting," said Reddy, for all of them.

"You know, whether it was tea or soap, she was more receptive to the notion of brand value than many of the cynical clowns we keep bumping into down here in South Mumbai. I think we need to reinvent Inner Force to capitalise on this phenomenon. Fast. We must stop looking at this thing as just an economic operation."

"But surely," ventured Reddy, "we need to test your hypothesis through a representative random-sample survey before we allocate any resources to it."

"Potential brand appreciation is not the best thing to determine through some questionnaire," said Singh, dismissively. But Reddy had a point, he knew. This was a megacorp, not a gutfeel-happy entrepreneurial venture. The company's management system would need substantiation to justify change in the project.

The question: what should the company do?

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