Market Research & Growth

Market research is sold as something you buy from an agency, priced for companies that have a budget line for it. For a business under five crore that is rarely the real constraint. The constraint is that the answer is already inside the building — in the ledger, in the sales team's heads, in what the distributor said last month — and nobody has put those sources next to each other and looked. The businesses that get expansion wrong are almost never the ones that skipped research. They are the ones that researched the market they were entering and not the business they were entering it with.

• A new city or segment is being planned on the strength of one relationship and an assumption that the home market's habits travel.
• Competitors are winning business and nobody in the firm can say specifically what they are offering or at what price.
• The launch plan is a date and a budget rather than a segment, a channel and a first hundred customers.

Firms planning a launch, a new city, a new segment — or defending a position that has started to slip.

We work the market from three sides: what your own data already says about who buys and why, what the trade says when the owner is not in the room, and what the competition is actually doing rather than what its website claims. For an entry question the output is a written read on the segment, the realistic channel options with what each costs to build, and the specific things about your business that will not survive the move. For a defence question it is where the position slipped and what is recoverable.

A market entry study or a competitive read is usually a short, self-contained piece at a fixed fee — this is the work clients most often buy without going further, and that is a legitimate outcome. Expansion advisory that runs through execution sits on the longer twelve-to-eighteen-month engagement, because a new geography reveals its problems on a delay. Go-to-market work is scoped to the launch calendar.