With husband Rajesh, Priya Monga co-founded RC&M, a rural marketing firm, in 1990. Soon, the firm turned out to be a pioneer in rural and experiential marketing for clients such as Airtel, Budweiser and LG. Its award-winning Toofan campaign for Mahindra & Mahindra, which sustained an ad blast for 600 days across 1,000 villages, is still a part of ad world folklore. The past two decades have been one of huge learning, Monga says. Two key lessons she’s learnt—the need to innovate, and listen to those with their ears to the ground.

Rajesh, the co-founder of RC&M and my husband, worked as an advertising and industrial photographer for Eicher Motors back in the 1990s. That’s when Eicher decided to enter the rural market. They asked Rajesh to design a campaign for them. So, we bought four tractors, trained the manpower and made a film with a haathi and ghoda, where the tractor was depicted as the “lambi race ka ghoda”. The campaign was really successful. That’s what got us interested in rural marketing. But the going was tough.

I wish we knew the “India pulse” better when we began. There was a lot of trial-and-error: we had to explore which medium of communication worked better where and that demographics react differently. Something that worked in the Northeast will not receive the same reaction in the south—we started to understand the Indian pulse along the way. For instance, we realised that having a customer base was not enough in a rural and semi-urban space; one needed integrated network partners on the ground. We had to integrate ourselves to the community. We didn’t remain just marketers. We became their postmen, informal banks and even a trade union of sorts for the people.

It’s the 150-odd boys working on the ground for the past two decades who have taught us that there’s life beyond our air AC offices. They are the people with the real knowledge."—Priya Monga, RC&M Experiential Marketing 

Even as you build comfort with people, you can’t ever think you know it all. Through my 21 years as an entrepreneur with RC&M, I’ve learnt that one constantly needs to innovate. Initially, we used to give a single solution to clients. But the changing market dynamics taught us that we needed to give a complete 360 degrees communication plan. We started using online media, on-ground advertising, mobile marketing and PR and results were there to see. You need to give your client a number of solutions along with a number of vehicles to drive that communication to get results. Outsourcing might have been a trend over the past decade. My experiences have taught me that one can control quality when one does everything in-house—right from production to technical work. When a campaign has to be implemented beyond a client’s office, in a 5,000-people town, your operations and control have to be well-defined. When you have your own people, they are answerable to you and there are fewer goof-ups. Today, 90 per cent of our models are built in-house.

This potential and capacity we’ ve built in-house has made us strong. We now have the strength to run 500 campaigns simultaneously with a team of 350 people. We have covered 70 per cent of rural, 75 per cent of semi-urban and 100 per cent of urban India. Invariably, it’s the 150-odd boys working on the ground for the past two decades who have taught us that there’s life beyond our air AC offices. They are the people with the real knowledge. They are our mentors.