Surviving with paranoia through green and clean marketing in Indian FMCG sector

The Indian FMCG sector is excited about burgeoning rural population whose incomes are rising and which is willing to spend on goods designed to improve life style and are hence targeted by many producers through bold new strategies under the saturating and cut throat competition in urban market. This has caused market size of FMCG sector which was to the tune of US$11.6 billion in 2003 to jump to in excess of US$13.1 billion today and is predicted to treble to US$33.4 billion in 2015. Majority of sale of FMCG products is made to middle class households and over 50% of middle class is in rural India. The rural market may be alluring but it is not without its problems and the civic society's conscious movement for green marketing only exaggerates this problem. This has ushered in the era of paranoid survival for the FMCG players. Using secondary sources of information available in public domain, this analytical paper based on snap survey of reported cases of non-green marketing strategies brings out the delicacies and intricacies of Indian FMCG sector interfacing socio-economic and environmental issues of rural India.