When does marketing actually begin?

Let’s forget brands, logos, packaging, and Instagram for a minute.

Meet Radha.

She has a small kitchen garden. Nothing fancy—just daily care, compost from the backyard, and seasonal wisdom. This Thursday morning, she has three bottle gourds (lauki) ready to harvest.

Radha’s household can consume one lauki over the next two days. Two will go soft. One will start looking suspicious.
At that moment—not in a classroom, not in a B-school—marketing is born.

Radha now has a volume mismatch.
Not surplus farming. Not scale. Just two extra units.

She doesn’t need a brand.
She doesn’t need “promotion.”
She needs an answer to three questions:

•    Who can use this today?
•    How do I reach them before it spoils?
•    What is a fair exchange—cash, grain, favor, goodwill?
That one phone call to a neighbor.
That quick chat near the water tap.
That “Aunty, lauki chahiye?” moment.

👉 That is marketing.

Neutral insight:
 Marketing doesn’t start with size or scale. It starts with excess beyond self-use—even if it’s just one vegetable.

My take (no hiding now):

We’ve over-romanticized scale and completely ignored micro-mismatch marketing.

NRLM ecosystems succeed not when enterprises scale fast, but when thousands of Radhas solve tiny surplus problems daily.