Use cases · 4 min read

Advertising & Media Research by Industry: Use Cases from FMCG to Healthcare

How different Indian industries use advertising & media research: FMCG, healthcare, BFSI, automotive, real estate, edtech, retail and technology.

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Quick answer

Advertising & Media Research is used across Indian industries: FMCG for launches and packs, healthcare for prescriber and patient insight, BFSI for customer journeys, automotive for buyer needs, and technology for B2B demand.

At a glance

Guide type: Use cases · 4 minute read
Method covered: Advertising & Media Research
Research family: Quantitative research
Typical timeline: 2–4 weeks for a pre-test; continuous for campaign tracking
Typical sample: 150–250 respondents per execution tested, per market
Written for: Category teams looking for precedent · Agencies pitching a sector · Anyone asking “does this work here?”

Key takeaways

Every industry adapts the method to its buyers
Specialist audiences need specialist recruitment
Regulated sectors need compliance-aware research
Cross-industry experience brings fresh perspective

Reader intent

Who this guide is for

Three readers arrive here with different problems. Each should be able to act on this page without reading all of it.

Category teams looking for precedent
Where advertising & media research has moved a decision in sectors adjacent to yours.
Agencies pitching a sector
Use-case patterns that travel across categories, and the ones that do not.
Anyone asking “does this work here?”
Sector-by-sector applications, with the typical question each one answers.

FMCG

Research for packaged foods, home care and personal care brands across general and modern trade. Typical advertising & media research questions: Which pack sizes win in rural markets? How are D2C brands changing loyalty?

Healthcare

Insights for hospitals, diagnostics chains, clinics and health-tech platforms. Typical advertising & media research questions: How do patients choose a hospital? What drives diagnostics loyalty?

Pharmaceuticals

Prescriber, chemist and patient research for Indian and global pharma companies. Typical advertising & media research questions: How do doctors pick between brands? What is the trade margin structure?

Banking & Financial Services

Customer, channel and product research for banks, NBFCs and wealth managers. Typical advertising & media research questions: Why do customers switch banks? How is credit demand changing in Tier 2 cities?

Insurance

Research on purchase journeys, agent channels and claims experience for insurers. Typical advertising & media research questions: What stops people buying health cover? How do agents influence choice?

Automotive

Research for car, two-wheeler and component makers, from concept clinics to dealer studies. Typical advertising & media research questions: What features matter to first-time buyers? How are dealers performing?

Electric Vehicles

Adoption, charging and pricing research for India's fast-growing EV market. Typical advertising & media research questions: What stops people buying an EV? Where is charging infrastructure needed?

Real Estate

Demand, pricing and buyer research for developers, REITs and brokers. Typical advertising & media research questions: What price can this micro-market support? What amenities do buyers value?

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs advertising & media research projects across 50 Indian cities and 30 industries. A senior research director leads every study, and our own supervised teams handle the fieldwork. You get clear recommendations, not just data tables.

Share your objective and we will send a scoped, fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours, with a recommended method, sample and timeline.

What goes wrong

Common mistakes in advertising & media research

Most disappointing advertising & media research studies fail for reasons that were visible in the design, not in the fieldwork. These are the ones we see most often, and what to do instead.

01
Judging an animatic as finished film
Rough executions under-score on likeability and over-score on message clarity. Read the diagnostics, and compare only against animatic norms.
02
Measuring liking instead of branding
An ad everyone enjoys and nobody attributes to you is a cost. Branded recall and message take-out come before likeability.
03
Exposure without clutter
Showing one ad in isolation inflates recall. Place it in a reel with competitive and category advertising.
04
Post-testing with no baseline
Without a pre-campaign read, any movement can be attributed to anything. Baseline before the first spot airs.
05
A questionnaire nobody piloted
Routing errors, ambiguous scales and a 35-minute runtime are cheap to find in a 30-interview pilot and expensive to find in the full dataset.
06
Fieldwork without an audit trail
GPS tags, timestamps, audio snippets and back-checks are what let you defend a finding when a regional team disputes it. Specify them in the contract.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

A working sequence for a advertising & media research project. Most of it costs nothing, and it saves the two weeks a re-field would take.

1
Agree the norm or benchmark the result will be judged against before testing.
2
Expose the execution inside a clutter reel of competitive advertising.
3
Measure branded recall and message take-out before asking about likeability.
4
Test in the languages the media plan will actually run in.
5
Read the diagnostics with the creative team present, so the fix is agreed in the room.
6
Keep the raw data, the syntax and the tables together, so the analysis can be re-run.
7
Agree in writing who acts on each finding, and by when, before the debrief ends.

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Answers

Frequently asked questions

The questions buyers ask us most often before they commission advertising & media research.

Do you have industry specialists?

Yes. We have dedicated teams covering 30 industries.

From guide to project

Where advertising & media research actually gets commissioned

If this guide has settled the method, these are the pages worth opening next: the service itself, and the markets where advertising & media research is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring