Humanizing big data

One of the top multinational conglomerates in India was on a mission to strategically plan for the next decade and find a faster and reliable way to do so. The project was about foretelling the future of India and predicting how, where and with whom the multiple brands of the group could grow their business before any competitors could. The company hired us to ethnographically zoom in identified fastest-growing consumption centers and understand the cultural, economic and infrastructural forces impacting them as well as the people living and using these places — mapping the shifting aspirations driving this growth.

We needed to experience, capture and hear about the markers of change in order to build a future with foresight for the company. We, therefore, spent some time at the identified centers of growth and ethnographically recorded patterns of behavior and conversations with the community living and working in the area. We selected on the spot the most interesting aspirational stories of people we engaged with on the streets through Aspiration Pop-Ups and then visited their homes to get a deeper sense of the life journeys and their future dreams. During the in-home ethnographies, we asked their perspectives on cultural, economic and infrastructural shifts occurring in their areas and mapped what they looked forward to, what they were unhappy about and if there was anything missing.

We used the insights from these in situ explorations to help our client define core targets, areas, and categories of future growth — driving consumption and change in the country. The work was presented at the 2019 ESOMAR conference in Edinburgh to showcase how the methodology could be used to help brands predict future consumption faster by first focusing on macro changes and then zooming in the micro details of people’s lives.