Herbal Medicines

Herbal products contain enormous wealth of minerals, protein and vitamins.  Moreover, herbal products have great nutritive and medicinal value too.  The global wave of Herbalism and increased sensitivity to food ingredients has caused tremendous potential for herbal products in domestic market as well as abroad.  It is recommended to go for assessing the market potential and making a concerted and organized effort to turn this latent demand into an effective demand.  This should aim at tapping the existing potential in the market by introducing an aggressive promotional campaign for the products. By adding the state-of-the-art kind of packaging to herbal products, they will emerge as branded premium products meant also for the elite class of the society rather than merely being cheap alternatives used only y the rural class.  In this respect packaging is going to add a lot of value in the products.  This will also help overcoming the apprehensions of the buyers about cleanliness, purity freshness and consistency in quality of the product.  Herbal products are presently under very limited use.  A number of variants of herbal products in solid, liquid and paste forms are needed for various market segments and for many uses of the products.  To popularize it, we must introduce its use in more health care household products.  The industrialists as well as the consumers of the relevant categories are to be persuaded to use the concerned herbal products.  We have to suggest when, where and how to use each of the variant of herbal products.  By popularizing hundreds of its uses, the crude and simple herbal products can be made a necessary component of more decent and favorite cosmetics and toiletries, hair oils, dentifrices perfumes, dishes, sweets, confectioneries and drinks.  In a similar move, the industrial units of a number of categories may be communicated with through the promotional efforts highlighting the profitable use of herbal products as inpute in their output.  In this backdrop the following research project has been taken up for study.  Taking into account the secondary as well as primary data (obtained by an elaborate consumers', dealers' and doctors' survey in four cities of the two zones of the country) an effort has been made to sense the pulse of the market.  The presentation of the research results has been organized in the following order.  Chapter one traces the history and evolution of the herbal remedies.  The next chapter describes the adoption and acceptance of the products worldwide.  A brief overview of the herbal medicine industry in India has been presented in chapter three.  The review of literature has been done in the following chapter.  Chapter five describes the methodological details and data used.  Chapters six, seven, eight and nine elaborately analyse the survey results relating to the different marketing subjects.  The last chapter provides a brief summary of the findings and recommendations for promotion of herbal medicine industry in the country.