Retail market research in India

Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching shoppers costs a fraction of what it costs to reach mall operators, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Start where the sector concentrates — Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Indore, Vijayawada, Hubli-Dharwad — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.

Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.

Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 4–5 weeks covering weekday, weekend and salary-week traffic, and the whole project is typically 7–8 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.

For this sector we most often use retail audit & distribution, mystery shopping, consumer research, usage & attitude studies. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.

Exit interviews run with centre or store consent, outside fire paths and queues, and never with a shopper managing children or visibly in a hurry. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.