Template · 4 min read

How to Write a Consumer Research Brief (Free Template)

A ready-to-use consumer research brief template for India: background, objectives, audience, geography, timeline, budget and deliverables.

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Quick answer

A good consumer research brief covers background, the business decision, research objectives, target audience, cities, timeline, budget range and expected deliverables. It fits on a single page.

At a glance

Guide type: Template · 4 minute read
Method covered: Consumer Research
Research family: Quantitative research
Typical timeline: 5–7 weeks: a week of design, two to three weeks in field, two weeks of analysis
Typical sample: 600–1,200 completed interviews, with 150+ in every segment you will read separately
Written for: Anyone writing a research brief · Procurement issuing an RFP · Agencies helping a client brief

Key takeaways

One page is enough
State the decision, not just the questions
Share a budget range for realistic proposals
Include what you already know

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.

Anyone writing a research brief
A structure for a consumer research brief that gets comparable proposals back instead of three different studies.
Procurement issuing an RFP
The scope lines that must be specified if quotes are to be compared like for like.
Agencies helping a client brief
The questions to ask before writing a proposal against a vague objective.

Brief template

Copy this structure into your brief:

Background: the business context
Decision: what will you do differently based on the results?
Objectives: 3–5 research questions
Audience: who, and how they are defined
Geography: cities, tiers and rural coverage
Timeline: when you need results
Budget range
Deliverables: e.g. consumer segments, purchase funnel, driver analysis

Tips

Share existing data, and say which stakeholders will use the results.

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs consumer 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 consumer research

Most disappointing consumer 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
Sizing the total sample but not the cells
A 600-interview study split across four cities and three income bands leaves 50 respondents per cell. Decide which sub-groups you will report on first, then size the sample upwards from them.
02
Asking about intention instead of behaviour
“Would you buy this?” is answered generously in Indian samples. Anchor the questionnaire on the last purchase: what was bought, which pack, at what price and from where.
03
Letting the sample drift to the metros
Convenience recruitment gravitates to high-footfall urban locations and quietly removes the Tier 2 and peri-urban households that carry your volume. Set city-tier quotas and police them daily.
04
Translating once and never back
A questionnaire translated but not back-translated changes meaning the moment it reaches the field. Pilot every language version separately before launch.
05
Significance claimed on thin bases
A gap between two sub-groups of forty respondents is rarely real. Agree the minimum reportable base before field and grey out everything below it in the tables.
06
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.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

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

1
Write down the three decisions the data must inform, then delete every question that does not serve one of them.
2
Define the segment cells up front and set a minimum reportable base of 150 for each.
3
Set quotas on age, NCCS, city tier and category usage, and lock them before fieldwork opens.
4
Pilot 30 interviews, read the verbatims, and fix routing and scale wording before full launch.
5
Back-check 20% of interviews by telephone and GPS-tag every in-person completion.
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 consumer research.

Can you help write the brief?

Yes. Book a short call and we'll shape the brief with you.

From guide to project

Where consumer 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 consumer research is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring

How to Write a Consumer Research Brief (Free Template)

Who this guide is for

Brief template

Tips

How Market Research India can help

Common mistakes in consumer research

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where consumer research actually gets commissioned

More reading on consumer research

More on consumer research

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