India's Research & Insights industry hits $3.2 billion, driven by 12.6% growth in FY2024
While traditional FMCG segments face slow volume growth, demand for research from retail and e-commerce is keeping momentum strong.
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India's Research & Insights industry continues to show double-digit growth, now valued at $3.2 billion USD. For FY2024, the industry expanded by 12.6%, exceeding last year's forecast but slightly lower than the 17.6% growth rate of the previous year, possibly indicating a return to normal growth levels, as per the report "The Indian Research & Insights Industry 2024 Update" by Market Research Society of India (MRSI).
The Analytics segment is booming, fuelled by global demand and the benefits of lower costs and skilled talent in India, attracting international companies to set up captive centres.
Custom Market Research (MR) services are outpacing Syndicated research in growth. This surge is driven by repeat customers with new plans, increased research activity, and new client acquisitions. Conversely, Syndicated Reports are struggling with limited offerings, increased competition, and falling prices, the report pointed out.
This shift highlights the industry's need to adapt to changing client preferences and the importance of flexible research approaches.
International clients remain the top revenue source for the Research & Insights industry, accounting for an impressive 80% share. This dominance is likely to continue into the coming year, indicating ongoing optimism. Rising international demand is driven by a focus on ESG factors, sustainability, and the circular economy, aligning industry success with global trends in responsible business practices. On the supply side, analytics remain a major driver of international demand, with Indian firms leading in innovation and scalability. Additionally, India’s lower costs and skilled talent pool attract global players to set up captive centers, supporting continued growth in the sector.
While traditional FMCG segments face slow volume growth, demand for research from retail and e-commerce is keeping momentum strong. The push for a digital economy, fueled by initiatives like Digital India, is accelerating this growth contributed by the BFSI segment.
In FY24, the industry hired around 145,000 full-time employees, reflecting a modest growth but also a noticeable slowdown in hiring momentum. After a post-COVID surge, hiring in the research and insights sector has perhaps now leveled off. Economic uncertainties have further led service providers, particularly in syndicated research and analytics, to adopt a cautious stance on workforce expansion.
The analytics sector continues to demand early-career professionals skilled in data science, AI, and machine learning. However, recruiting in these areas remains challenging due to high demand, educational gaps, experience requirements, and fierce competition resulting in companies growing concern about new hires’ ability to effectively apply their technical skills to drive business value.
Moreover, the integration of AI is another transformative force in the market research landscape. There are AI platforms that are using a combination of Visual AI including facial coding, eye-tracking and conversational AI including text sentiment, audio tonality to generate sentiment and thematic analysis. The combination of these emotional AI technologies allows a second-by-second analysis of consumers’ emotions and verbal responses during the interview process. The accuracy of these platforms is only going to improve in the future with more datapoints added at the backend, says Dixit Chanana Managing Director, Toluna, MetrixLab - India.
However, adapting and advancing the use of Digital tools retains some of the challenges that are specifically true for developing nations or nations with a lot of diversity, such as India. Digital is hindered by limited infrastructure, lower digital literacy, and connectivity issues. There are cultural factors, too. In India, for instance, qualitative research has long valued the warmth of face-to-face interaction, where unspoken nuances carry weight.
For example, the required rapport build-up reflexive listening while studying women who are not very literate in rural areas is extremely challenging if it is done purely digitally. For more evolved Urban, affluent cohorts, privacy concerns are especially prevalent, with many participants hesitant to share openly on digital platforms. This reminds us that, even as we embrace digital, we must preserve the depth and sensitivity inherent to qualitative research, says Sharmila Das, Chairwoman, Purpleaudacity.
The Covid era revolutionized social media consumption, with users spending 6+ hours daily online, 70% on video content. With 200Bn Instagram reels and 70Bn YouTube shorts watched daily, and 95+ minutes spent on TikTok, social media has become the primary hub for entertainment and influence.
As a result, today’s consumers access vast information from authentic sources, are vocal about preferences, and have shorter attention spans. Consumer companies struggle to extract actionable insights from unstructured video content across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and online communities – crucial sources for understanding consumer preferences and market trends.
Key challenges include: fragmented consumer conversations across platforms, traditional research methods’ slowness, difficulty integrating multiple data sources, and complexity in understanding multi-market consumer needs.
With influencer marketing projected to reach $30Bn globally, decoding video content is vital for tracking consumer trends. To address these challenges, companies must evolve beyond traditional research to understand consumer behavior through social , says rends and video content analysis, Tarun Dhamija, Co-Founder Convosight.
