Indian Market Research Industry - Challenges and Opportunities

The market research industry in India is on the cusp of a transformative era. Driven by a rapidly growing economy, growing emphasis on insights powered and data-driven decision making, technological advancements, multi-variate business questions across various industries, understanding evolving consumer behavior across specific target consumers and audiences, the next years promise both exciting opportunities and significant challenges for market researchers. The rapid rise in the number of Indian research organizations, increasing presence of global agencies and India as an offshore hub of research is strong evidence of the scope of the industry and opportunities.

Successful companies and brands are leveraging insights, data, analytics and technology to power business growth and brand building. While we are innovating and embracing insights and data in new ways, the one thing we should never lose sight of is that data is human at its core. Insights enable us to create meaningful consumer experiences for brands, leading to brand growth. Starting with and embedding consumer insights enabled by research has a key contribution to power up growth. Key performance indicators, as identified by research and data in many ways, also have a key contribution to managing and measuring performance, and these can include a wide variety of metrics, including interactions, perception and outcomes. New and integrated metrics are required like share of experiences, integrated share of voice across media, and a diverse market like India requires specific grounded methods to establish these. Brands constantly seek that strong meaningfulness, the elusive edge, the differentiator that propels them ahead of the curve, and insightful research can play a big role in this journey.

India's vast geographical spread, various industry sectors at play in a dynamic economic environment, diverse population and population strata-tier demographics, multitude of cultures create a complex market research landscape. Researchers need to be adept at understanding and navigating industry dynamics, business contexts, regional nuances, cultural variations, consumer profiles, category behaviors and other specificities to ensure relevant research approaches, tailoring the right questions, accurate data collection and analysis to deliver to the research objectives. Consumer profiling using robust, differentiating and relevant variables is a key evolution in a dynamic environment with rapidly changing consumer behaviour. The burgeoning internet penetration and smartphone adoption have paved the way for online research methodologies, integration with digital data, social media listening, and use of real-time data collection methods is increasingly witnessed. There is an increased gamut of agile methods and use of technology like AI for data analysis, innovative data collection methods like virtual reality, augmented reality and equivalents for concept and product testing, and others, but several of these need to evolve further in terms of level and depth of insights provided, by going beyond a one size fits all approach, and address specific questions or more holistic contexts, depending on the need. Using relevant automation and technology can help release time of researchers to focus on strategic analysis, for researchers to work like a detective and journalist with the data and storytelling.

Researchers must continuously master the fluency of data, and this is getting more complex due to the requirements and expectations of specific industries and categories, whether it is consumer products, durables, technology, e-commerce, digital, entertainment, automobiles, finance, healthcare or others. Researchers need to become comfortable handling complex datasets and multiple types of data, whether quantitative, qualitative, passive, active, observational, contextual or whatever. While core research & analysis expertise is crucial, the ability to connect different pieces of data and weave the results into a story with clear, actionable take-aways is paramount. Qualitive research with new and expert approaches is increasingly important to understand the “why” behind the “what”. Quicker qualitative approaches can feed better into the marketing mix development process. Researchers should be able to ask the right questions, analyze data critically, identify patterns and trends, and draw meaningful conclusions in a concise manner. Researchers must bridge the gap between technical proficiency and business acumen, becoming adept at data storytelling. This involves presenting findings in a compelling and visually engaging manner, using interactive and immersive platforms when applicable, highlighting key trends and insights and inform strategic decision-making. With large datasets, the capability of utilizing advanced statistical software, and wielding tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to extract deeper insights and generate predictive models becomes even more critical.

While the industry is a captivating story of solid growth and immense potential, talent and data are still at the core - bringing focus on the width and depth of talent, as well as the quality and specificity of data, both of which require enhancement. The industry needs an enhanced pool of talent equipped to dissect business questions to determine the right research designs beyond standard solutions, imagine and spearhead complex data analysis, leverage technology and AI tools, interpret data (what and why) and bring together an actionable set of sharp insights. Young talent with contemporary skills needs to be identified, nurtured, recognized and rewarded to future-proof the advancement of market research. With the rapid advancement of digital, while there are several online research methodologies and panels, issues like representativeness, accuracy of profiles, panel fatigue, and biased sampling methods threaten data validity. The time deficit of respondents, whether online or offline, is reducing the receptiveness of respondents for research activities, resulting in lower response rates and potentially biased data.

Research users have been demanding deeper insights, actionable recommendations, unpeeling of human truths and faster turnaround times. A critical task facing the industry researchers is the need to consistently meet and exceed these expectations and articulate the value that research adds to decision making and business actions. The data deluge is also calling for the right talent, agile processes and tools to be embedded to realize the full value of data. Differentiation through specialized services, innovative methodologies, and exceptional value propositions will be crucial for success. The market is opening up for specific capability-oriented research firms specializing in specific industries or consumer segments, allowing for deeper expertise and more targeted insights. Market measurement in a complex and diverse market like India and increased fragmentation calls for a higher level of scrutiny of methods and data. The rapid rise of digital and eCommerce has room to build more effective research solutions. The right level of expertise to conduct system 1 and system 2 research to answer specific business questions, understanding the complexity of human behaviour, as well as the ability to interpret and integrate findings is a strategic imperative, as business problems become more complex and inter-connected. Sometimes large studies and real-world data we possess is not fully representative, patchy, sparse, or glaringly imbalanced. Strategic research requiring more comprehensive understanding compared to other markets often requires bringing together different datasets, in-depth analysis and longer questionaries, and more modular approaches are required to ensure data quality. Several research users are conversing around clear return on investment (ROI) from research and providing tangible value in a timely manner is key to answer this.

AI's rapid ascension is reshaping every facet of businesses, making its integration into market research indispensable. Data analytics offers immense potential for uncovering hidden trends, identifying patterns in massive datasets, and generating deeper customer insights.

Advanced generative AI and machine learning can facilitate easy access to ingested data and knowledge, help search and synthesize data & information quickly, be like a useful research assistant by one’s side and empower research professionals. AI is here to make humans more powerful, efficient and effective, and this is just the beginning. Technology advancement, integration with advanced analytics, mining multiple sources of data and predictive approaches can fuel the next wave of transformation in research. This can be a big game changer in the way we work and engage with data & insights. Every leader needs to explore what it takes to co-exist with AI and tap into its full potential, and to make it their mandate to unite human and machine intelligence, harness the possibilities and power of AI responsibly, maximize benefits and mitigate risks.

In the world of today, it is of utmost importance that we fully ensure that we are harnessing vast amounts of data while ensuring utmost privacy and attention to all aspects of the regulatory environment. Developments around synthetic data, artificially and algorithmically generated, are interesting, and can be a useful dimension to complement understanding, scenario testing, deep dive on hypotheses, and glean insights in environments where using real data might be inadequate or challenging. Synthetic data analysis can normalize data, and this can lose the outliers and edges, which can be a loss. The long-term implication of use of such type of data has to be assessed as well. It’s a tool, and like all tools, its efficacy lies in how adeptly we use it, including keeping data provenance, nuanced data quality and ethical considerations in full view.

The future will call for sharper and holistic storytelling, more accurate data, sharper tools, predictive approaches, solid benchmarks, simulations of possible future scenarios, diagnostic approaches, ability to gauge potential outcomes, to go beyond past data and trends, and answer business questions with more precision. In an industry environment awash with new developments and buzzwords, it’s key not to lose sight of the question we are answering or the business problem/opportunity that we are addressing. More inter-dependent business questions, speed and fuzziness of new developments will continue to challenge the industry to offer enhanced solutions continuously. Further industry (and beyond) collaboration and connection will be required to combine data and bring it to life, as no one has the ability to answer all nuances of questions, but collectively we can. The market research industry is founded and grounded on data and people, and the quality of this core will continue to be cornerstone of the pace of acceleration of the industry.