Hiring guide · 4 min read

Usage & Attitude Studies: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Research Firm

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

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Quick answer

Before hiring a usage & attitude 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: Usage & Attitude Studies
Research family: Quantitative research
Typical timeline: 6–9 weeks, as the segmentation analysis sits behind the fieldwork
Typical sample: 800–1,500 completes, which is what a stable segmentation needs
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 usage & attitude 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. category map, opportunity sizing, segment profiles)
Can I see a sample report?

How Market Research India can help

Market Research India designs and runs usage & attitude 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 usage & attitude studies

Most disappointing usage & attitude 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 questionnaire that tries to answer everything
U&A studies attract every pending question in the business and end up at 45 minutes. Protect the length; it protects the data.
02
Global attitude batteries used untested
Statements written for another market translate into agreement with everything. Pre-test the battery locally and cut what does not discriminate.
03
Occasions defined by the brand team
Consumption occasions should come out of qualitative work with consumers and then be quantified — not invented in a workshop and confirmed.
04
Segmenting before the data is clean
A cluster solution built on unvalidated data is stable, persuasive and wrong. Clean, weight and sanity-check first.
05
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.
06
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.

Run through this before sign-off

Your checklist before you brief anyone

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

1
Cap the questionnaire at 25 minutes and defend the limit against late additions.
2
Generate occasions qualitatively before you try to measure them.
3
Pre-test attitude statements locally and drop those everyone agrees with.
4
Capture frequency and quantity, not just whether someone uses the category.
5
Build segments on variables you can actually target in media or in trade.
6
Agree the minimum reportable base before fieldwork, and hold the line in the tables.
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 usage & attitude studies.

Will you answer these questions for us?

Gladly. Ask us on a discovery call.

From guide to project

Where usage & attitude 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 usage & attitude studies is most often run for our clients.

Keep exploring

Usage & Attitude 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 usage & attitude studies

Your checklist before you brief anyone

Frequently asked questions

Where usage & attitude studies actually gets commissioned

More reading on usage & attitude studies

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