Home/India market entry/What a market entry study should contain
Guide · India market entry
What an India market entry study should actually contain
Most are too long, too optimistic and structured to impress rather than to decide. Here is what to insist on, and what to send back.
Foreign companies commission India studies regularly and are frequently disappointed by them, without always being able to articulate why. The reports look thorough. They contain a great deal of data. They are also, often, unusable for the decision they were meant to support.
The diagnostic test is simple: could a director read this and make a defensible go or no-go call? If the report describes the market without recommending an action, or recommends an action without showing the arithmetic behind it, it has failed regardless of length.
What a credible study contains
- A decision section at the front — eight to ten pages that a busy executive can read, containing the recommendation and the reasoning. The detail supports it; it does not replace it.
- Market sizing with visible assumptions — the arithmetic shown, the assumptions labelled, and the sensitivity to the ones that carry weight. A single confident number is a warning sign.
- Your addressable market, not the category — the portion you can actually reach given your price position, channel access and specification relevance. Frequently a fraction of the headline figure.
- Landed-cost and price analysis — modelled to shelf or to quoted price, against the real competitive set. If a study does not contain this, it cannot support a decision.
- Competitors including local substitutes — the unbranded, the domestic and the cheap. International competitors are the easy half.
- Route-to-market comparison — options with trade-offs, not a single recommendation asserted.
- Primary evidence — conversations with real channel participants and buyers. A study built entirely on desk research tells you what is published, not what is true.
- Risks and what would change the answer — including the conditions under which the recommendation would reverse.
What to send back
- Population and GDP as opportunity — everyone knows India is large. It is not an argument for your product.
- A TAM built by multiplying a category figure by an assumed share — this is arithmetic dressed as analysis.
- No pricing analysis — the most common and most disqualifying omission.
- Only international competitors — usually means the researcher did not speak to anyone in the market.
- A recommendation with no dissenting case — a study that cannot articulate the argument against its own conclusion has not tested it.
- Length as a proxy for rigour — a hundred and twenty pages of market description is easier to produce than twenty pages of judgement.
Questions
What overseas teams ask
How much should a study cost?
It varies with depth and category, but a credible focused market-entry diagnostic for a single category generally sits in the ₹3–5 lakh range over four to six weeks. Substantially cheaper usually means desk research only; substantially more usually means primary consumer research, which is a different and legitimate exercise.
Should we commission two studies for comparison?
Rarely worth it. Better to specify one well — insist on the pricing analysis, the primary interviews and the dissenting case — and to review the interim findings rather than only the final document.
Can we do this ourselves?
Partly. Desk research, competitor collection and price checking are all doable in-house if you have someone with time. What is hard from outside India is knowing which sources are reliable, getting channel participants to speak candidly, and reading what is not said in those conversations.
Keep reading
Related pages
Talk it through before you commit budget
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether India is a real opportunity for your category, what the sensible first step is, and what it should cost. No deck, no preamble.