Contraceptive Social Marketing

The PERFORM survey conducted in 1995, shows that there are 697,000 retail outlets in U.P. of which only 110,000 stock contraceptives. Many of these are in remote rural areas. Thus there is an immense potential to reach out to the rural population through commercial marketing, by promotion of specific brands and creating a distribution network for them in villages and small towns. To this end, SIFPSA supported a rural marketing project implemented by M/s Hindustan Latex Ltd. (HLL) with the objective of making condoms and oral contraceptive pills widely available in towns of up to 20,000 population in 28 districts of U.P. The project continued from 1997 to 2000.

An independent evaluation of this project confirmed that the project had achieved a greater penetration of commercial branded condoms in rural areas and extensive promotional inputs had resulted in higher sales of contraceptives.

Based on the encouraging results of the first project and the need to expand marketing of contraceptives, M/s HLL was again selected for marketing condoms and oral contraceptive pills throughout U.P.

This three year project, being implemented from April 2000, has set objectives of expanding the sale of specific commercial and subsidized brands of condoms and oral pills in rural areas of U.P. to provide 13.67 lac couple years of protection.

To increase demand and create brand awareness, the project has an extensive promotional strategy that includes various media like stalls in melas (fairs) & haats (weekly markets), video- van operations , radio & press ads., wall & shop paintings and hoardings. To facilitate ease in purchase as well as to boost top of the mind recall, product messages are prominently displayed at retail outlets through posters, danglers, stickers etc. Innovative means, like printing promotional messages for oral pills on bindi packets are being used to increase recall amongst rural women.

With the aim of at least one retail outlet stocking both pills and condoms in 9000 additional villages at the end of three years, the project will concentrate on villages with a population of less than 5000 which have no outlet selling contraceptives at present. The focus will also be on non-traditional outlets like grocers as most of these villages have no medicine shops. M/s HLL will cater to these villages through the established marketing channels comprising of C & F agents, stockists, retailers and van sales. Additionally they are also linking up with IFPS project activities: integrating with outreach efforts of over 100 NGOs and milk cooperatives, promoting and supplying to rural medical practitioners and other potential linkages through district action plans (DAPs).

To ensure the quality of contraceptives being supplied, a strict quality assurance mechanism has been adopted for all products to be used under the project. Each consignment of products is tested at reputed quality assurance laboratories before being despatched to the market.

Monitoring of the project is being done by a six-monthly retail audit to track sales and independent village surveys to confirm brand penetration at village level. These will form the basis for payment by SIFPSA to HLL under an elaborate performance based disbursement system linking disbursement of funds to achievement of rural sales and brand penetration objectives.