Hiring guide · 4 min read

Market Feasibility Studies: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Ten questions to ask any market feasibility studies provider in India before you sign, covering fieldwork, quality, sampling, data security and reporting.

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Quick answer

Before hiring a market feasibility studies firm, ask who does the fieldwork, how quality is checked, how the sample is designed, which languages they cover, how data is secured, who writes the report, and what the deliverables include.

At a glance

Guide type: Hiring guide · 4 minute read
Method covered: Market Feasibility Studies
Research family: Strategy research
Typical timeline: 6–10 weeks, longer where regulatory or land-approval enquiries are in scope
Typical sample: 15–25 stakeholder interviews plus a demand-side survey of 200–400 potential buyers
Written for: Buyers running a vendor call · Procurement scoring proposals · First-time commissioners

Key takeaways

Good firms answer these questions confidently
Ask for QC evidence from past projects
Check DPDP Act compliance
Meet the person who will lead your project

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.

Buyers running a vendor call
Questions that reveal whether an agency has actually run market feasibility studies at your scale.
Procurement scoring proposals
A way to score the answers rather than the presentation.
First-time commissioners
What good answers sound like, so you can tell them from merely fluent ones.

The 10 questions

Do you run fieldwork in-house in my cities?
How do you verify interviews?
How will you design the sample?
Which languages do you work in?
How do you handle translation?
How is data secured, and are you DPDP compliant?
Who leads the project day to day?
Who writes the report?
What exactly will I receive? (e.g. feasibility report, entry strategy, risk matrix)
Can I see a sample report?

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs market feasibility studies 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 market feasibility studies

Most disappointing market feasibility studies 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
A top-down market size with no bottom-up check
Multiplying a published national figure by a share assumption is not an estimate, it is a hope. Build demand from units, outlets or households and reconcile the two.
02
Reading stated intent as demand
Purchase intent overstates behaviour everywhere, and by more in interview settings. Discount it, or triangulate against observed proxies such as current category spend.
03
Leaving the approval path out of the timeline
Licences, clearances and local permissions routinely add months. A case that ignores them is optimistic on both cash flow and launch date.
04
A single base case with no downside
A board cannot sanction a number with no range around it. Model base, downside and upside, and state what triggers each.
05
Assumptions buried in the model
A number nobody can trace is challenged once and ignored thereafter. Every assumption on its own labelled line, with its source.
06
Analysis with no recommendation attached
Senior readers need a position. Close each section with what you would do, and what would have to be true for you to change your mind.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

A working sequence for a market feasibility studies project. Most of it costs nothing, and it saves the two weeks a re-field would take.

1
Write the go/no-go criteria before the research starts, and have them signed off.
2
Build demand top-down and bottom-up independently, then explain the gap between them.
3
Interview the supply side — distributors, suppliers, competitors — not only prospective buyers.
4
Price the regulatory and approval path in both money and months.
5
Name the two or three conditions under which the recommendation would flip.
6
Hand over a working model rather than a PDF, so the team can update it next quarter.
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 market feasibility studies.

Will you answer these questions for us?

Gladly. Ask us on a discovery call.

From guide to project

Where market feasibility studies actually gets commissioned

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

Keep exploring

Market Feasibility Studies: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

Who this guide is for

The 10 questions

How Market Research India can help

Common mistakes in market feasibility studies

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where market feasibility studies actually gets commissioned

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