Brands take research into their own hands, yet the picture is far from simple

New Delhi: For years, Indian marketers have relied on structured research, syndicated trackers and large-scale studies to understand their consumers. But a visible shift is underway: brands are increasingly taking market research into their own hands, sometimes literally, by stepping into homes, shops, kirana stores and even small-town living rooms to decode real-world behaviour.

This renewed emphasis on “last-mile consumer truth” is not just a cultural change; it is reshaping how organisations design products, build creative, brief agencies and measure effectiveness. 

At the same time, traditional research companies are adapting to a model where insight is no longer a centrally held asset, but something decentralised across marketing, product, sales and leadership teams.

The question is simple: Does this proximity lead to better decisions or risk creating anecdotal traps?

The answer, as always in marketing, is far more layered.

Why brands want to get closer to consumers again

Multiple forces are converging. Speed, fragmented cultural triggers, hyper-local adoption cycles and the limitations of syndicated studies are prompting marketers to adopt hybrid models: structured quantitative research balanced with immersive, real-world observation.

A spokesperson for Marico articulated this shift succinctly, saying the company balances scale with context. “While structured studies provide scale, valuable benchmarks, and continue to guide our long-term strategy, immersing our teams in consumers’ everyday environments uncovers cultural and contextual nuances, delivering deeper, actionable insights that reflect real behaviour and needs,” the spokesperson said.

However, the company is clear about the risks. “We avoid treating every anecdote as insight. Field learnings are rigorously validated through behavioural and quantitative checks, ensuring that our insights are both rich and actionable.”

At Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), this closeness is a non-negotiable part of marketing culture. Harsh Deep Chhabra, Global Media Lead, GCPL, offered a candid admission. He said, “The folks who stay closest to the consumer are the ones doing it right. The people who think ‘medium first’ may or may not get it right.”

He emphasised that proximity is institutional, not individual. “All of us in the marketing community spend about ten days every quarter in the field. We sit in consumers’ homes, spend a day with them and understand their lives. The kind of insights that emerge from that are incredible.”

But Chhabra also issued a caution. It is that many marketers claim to be consumer-centric, but few actually spend the time required. “I genuinely wish that it were true that everyone was spending as much time with consumers as they claim,” Chhabra said. 

Research agencies acknowledge the shift but warn against the ‘illusion of insight’

Market research companies agree that consumer closeness is rising and necessary. But they caution that without structure, it can introduce new risks.

Ipsos India observed that marketers want faster, more contextual consumer understanding, pushing them to collect their own insights. Zooming in, Anthony D'Souza, Executive Director & Country Service Line Leader (Innovation), Ipsos India, said, “Brands are increasingly taking insight generation into their own hands, but professional partners are still crucial for validation, predictive modelling and decision frameworks.”

Tanmay Jaswal, Director, CrispMR, highlighted that the demand for agile, do-it-yourself tools is increasing, allowing even smaller marketing teams to conduct quick reads. However, the firm warned that decentralised insight generation must still sit within a scientifically valid framework; otherwise, companies risk mistaking isolated anecdotes for category truth.

Praveen Nijhara, CEO, Hansa Research, echoed this sentiment, saying that the best outcomes come from a “federated” research model where brand teams generate hypotheses through immersion, but rely on structured verification for accuracy and decision-making.

Market trips help, but only science drives growth

Amid the industry’s rising fascination with last-mile learning, Dabur India takes a contrarian stance rooted in evidence-based marketing principles.

Binit Kumar, Category Head (Oral Care), Dabur India, argued that speed should not be met with unstructured methods. “I would argue that the speed challenge should be met by optimising existing measurement systems rather than replacing them with quick, potentially biased qualitative trips,” he said.

Kumar emphasised mental availability and category entry points as the real levers of growth. 

“The fastest insight is not a market trip, but a better, cleaner, scientifically valid, structured measurement of these memory links, tracked frequently.”

On cultural nuance, he was even more direct. “Nuance is overrated,” he said, adding that buyer behaviour is remarkably consistent across markets, shaped by universal laws such as Double Jeopardy. Instead of seeking deep, attitudinal differences, he argued that brands should prioritise salience, distinctive brand assets and broader buyer recruitment.

He warned strongly against anecdotal traps. “A marketer's single conversation with a highly engaged consumer is not representative of the light buyer base,” he said, stressing that light buyers drive growth and are the least likely to appear in qualitative interactions.

For him, decentralised insight models only work if anchored in empirical discipline. “If insight is decentralised without a unifying, evidence-based framework, it leads to fragmentation and ineffective marketing.”

The tension: authenticity vs. representativeness

The emerging debate is not about whether immersion is valuable. Everyone agrees that seeing real-world behaviour sharpens intuition and contextual understanding.

The tension lies here:

• Proximity reveals patterns that structured studies often miss, which is, behaviour at the shelf, usage hacks, family dynamics, and unspoken barriers.

• But proximity also tempts marketers into over-indexing on compelling stories, extreme cases and “heavy users” who rarely represent the full market.

Marico attempts to solve this with a dual approach: learn fast through immersion, then validate at scale. Dabur, on the other hand, cautions that if the validation becomes secondary, the entire marketing system may drift away from proven laws.

Research agencies collectively argue that immersion is excellent for hypothesis generation but dangerous as a standalone insight source.

Why decentralised insight is reshaping organisations

One reason for the resurgence of consumer closeness is structural. As marketing, strategy, product and sales converge, consumer understanding is no longer a single team’s responsibility.

• Marico sees cross-functional collaboration as essential to driving business outcomes.

• GCPL mandates immersion across marketing, trade and media teams.

• Dabur frames consumer understanding around two pillars: mental availability (marketing/strategy) and physical availability (product/sales/supply chain).

This shift is forcing research partners to build solutions for:

• mixed-method validation,

• rapid decision cycles,

• business-linked KPIs rather than attitudinal ones,

• and decentralised data models accessible to multiple teams, not just insight managers.

What this means for creative, product and brand strategy

The rise of brand-led insight generation is changing how briefs are written and decisions are made.

1. Creative

GCPL believes creatives are sharper when briefed with lived consumer reality, not abstract segmentation decks. Dabur disagrees, warning that creatives may over-index on niche qualitative findings instead of building memory structures and distinctive assets.

2. Product innovation

Last-mile observation surfaces new usage moments, hacks and unmet needs but can also lead teams toward niche innovations unsupported by scale. Evidence-based frameworks emphasise solving friction, improving availability and expanding category entry points instead.

3. Advertising effectiveness

Research agencies note that when brands own more insight generation, effectiveness improves if, and only if, the organisation maintains rigour in measurement and decision-making.

Where India’s brand research ecosystem goes next

Three major patterns are emerging in India’s consumer understanding landscape:

1. Hybrid models will dominat

Brands will continue mixing immersion, digital behaviour data and structured research. Neither will replace the other.

2. Research agencies will become validators, not gatekeepers

Their value will increasingly lie in scaling, modelling, benchmarking, and ensuring that internal insights do not drift into biased narratives.

3. Consumer understanding will become a business design function

Not a research division, not a marketing support unit, but a strategic layer influencing everything from packaging to media to distribution.

4. Proximity will matter, but discipline will matter mor

The strongest systems will be those that blend intuition with laws, anecdotes with representativeness, and speed with scientific validation.

Finding the balance

Indian brands are rediscovering the value of being close to consumers, but the real challenge lies in combining that closeness with discipline.

Harsh Deep Chhabra of GCPL warns that the real risk comes when marketers “start imagining that the consumer is your own version of who you think they are.” Dabur’s Kumar adds that relying on anecdotal intuition without empirical grounding can derail growth, while Marico stresses that cultural nuance and lived behaviour must be respected, but always validated.

The future of consumer understanding in India, it seems, will not be dictated by agencies or marketers alone. Instead, it will favour organisations that can observe richly, measure rigorously, and make decisions collectively.