Nikita Garg Section-D

Decision Sheet

Hindustan Levers Project Shakti- Marketing FMCG to the Rural Consumer Objective: To scale up the successful Project Shakti; increase consumer base to 100 million with 25000 entrepreneurs. Situation Analysis: Project Shakti is HULs initiative to tap the inaccessible, low potential rural markets which have a potential consumer base of 500million. It is aimed towards improving the quality of life in rural areas by way of creating a new market, by the help of the underprivileged rural women. Help of NGOs and self-help groups and the micro finance model. Women are hired as Shakti entrepreneurs and they sell door to door in their village and also in the neighbouring villages. Current issues are very typical and social. No-self-help groups in some villages make them totally unreachable. Also, the prosperity level varies greatly from state to state resulting in problems with the existing pricing model. Also, women are not properly trained and have minimal exposure leading to high dropout. Also, use of ishakti-internet portal for awareness and vani-the communicator. Recommendation: 1. Conduct extensive training programmes for the Shakti entrepreneurs through the Rural sales promoters (RSP) who will in turn trained by HUL. 2. Make successful Shakti entrepreneurs meet other women for improving their skill set and addressing the local problems with a better technique. 3. Train Shakti entrepreneurs to become vanis. 4. Mobilise NGOs in areas where no SHG exist. 5. In male-dominated areas appoint male Shakti entrepreneurs. 6. Increase the cut for Shakti entrepreneurs from 11% to 13%- the extra 2% can be used to extend credit to the villagers and gain a loyalty. Rationale: The training programme through the RSPs will result in improvement of the skill set of the Shakti women, thus leading to a decrease in the drop-out rate, saving the cost of locating another SHG and another leader once again. To improve the skill set and tackle local problems the other successful Shakti women should be made to interact with the women. Training the existing Shakti entrepreneurs as vanis ensure that the search for new human force and the cost incurred in that is minimized. Now the vanis have product knowledge also apart from the social knowledge, they can successfully carry out both activities without incurring extra training costs for both of them separately. By employing men HLL will not only solve a major problem of unemployment in the areas, it will also lead to indirect uplifting of the women folk. The Shakti women have much more margin than the local retailer and could easily pass on that to the consumers but this would reduce the incentive to the interest surviving woman, an increase in margin would definitely increase the welfare and would attract more women from neighbouring areas. Engaging NGOs/ organizing NGOs in partnership with the state governments would make the inaccessible areas easy to reach. The govt. approval can be achieved by showing the benefit derived by the other states. Positives Increase in consumer base Increase in welfare and rural betterment. Wide-spread reach in inaccessible villages increasing the penetration and hence the revenue. No additional costs on media/ advertising. No additional procurement costs for new sales force/vanis. Negatives: Male- Shakti entrepreneurs might not work effectively- women identify with women better, especially in rural areas. Loss of the shakti-entrepreneur will mean total cut off from the village in case the vani is same.