To help you act on it.
+91 Insights is a strategy consultancy that specialises in and obsesses over one thing: Making Sense of India and Indians.
We sit at the intersection of deep domain intelligence and high-stakes decision-making. Our domain is India itself: its people, its culture, its contradictions, its politics, its consumption and the consumer behaviour that emerges from all of it.
Industry Agnostic. India Centric.
We do not specialise in a sector. We specialise in India.
We have sat in a war room designing voter outreach for 200 million Scheduled Caste citizens and in a boardroom pricing luxury apartments in Hyderabad's CBD. We have built cloud kitchen brands for Swiggy and reimagined a four-generation Calcutta jeweller for modern India. We have designed whiskey brands for Bacardi and mapped the political psyche of India's first-time voters.
The strategic question changes. The muscle — deep, ground-up Indian consumer intelligence translated into decisions — does not.
Our portfolio spans political strategy, real estate, FMCG, fintech, edtech, food-tech, automobiles, luxury retail, and spirits. Consumer behaviour does not respect industry boundaries. The psychological drivers behind a Marwari family's jewellery purchase illuminate the trust dynamics of a digital payments product. Cross-pollination across sectors is where the deepest strategic insight lives.
On-ground intelligence coverage across the length, breadth, and depth of the country. From rural Bihar to urban Pune, from Sikh communities in Punjab to Madiga communities in Telangana. We have sat across from daily-wage labourers earning ₹10,000 a month and NRI buyers making ₹3 crore purchase decisions. This is not claimed expertise. It is logged fieldwork.
Political consulting demands infrastructure that brand consulting does not: the ability to deploy fieldwork teams in 16 locations simultaneously, to recruit respondents in communities that no market research panel can reach, to facilitate discussions in local languages with cultural fluency. This infrastructure — built for elections — is now available to every client, in every sector.
We Make Sense of India. So You Can Act on It.
You plug us into your organisation, and we become your India intelligence function. No hiring. No onboarding. No six-month ramp-up. From week one, senior strategists are embedded in your decision cycle — designing research, extracting insight, and translating it into the specific strategic decision you need to make.
No procurement cycles. Operational from day one.
Institutional memory that compounds with each project.
We're at the table when the decision is made.
Senior talent at a fraction of building in-house.
A defined strategic question that needs answering. Research design through final recommendation.
Ongoing India intelligence function. Quarterly strategy cycles, embedded in your decision rhythm.
You need to know what Indians will actually pay — not what they say they like in a survey. We design conjoint studies, willingness-to-pay analyses, and trade-off experiments that simulate real purchase decisions.
You need to understand its cultural logic — how people think, what they trust, what motivates them, what they fear. We conduct deep qualitative immersion across any geography and any community in India.
The foundation has to be consumer truth, not creative instinct alone. We audit the consumer, category, and competition, define brand foundations, and convert them into a go-to-market playbook.
You need to understand citizen sentiment, voter psychology, or community dynamics at a depth that no opinion poll can provide.
You need ground truth — not macro reports from consulting firms who have never left South Mumbai. We provide on-ground consumer intelligence from every socio-cultural region of India.
You need to validate whether a product has real consumer pull, whether a market size estimate holds up on the ground. We provide primary consumer validation — field intelligence, not desk research.
Deep case studies from our core engagements — where consumer intelligence was translated into high-stakes strategy.
Built the first strategic intelligence map of India's Gen Z voters — 100 million citizens aged 15–20 who will cast their first ballot in 2029. No research on this cohort existed anywhere.
This generation holds nationalist pride but articulates it using liberal vocabulary. This is not confusion — it is strategic adaptation. Any political messaging that treats them as either "liberal" or "conservative" will miss them entirely.
The sitting leadership enjoys high approval — but for correcting the past, not for building the future. The support is broad but shallow. There is a significant credibility gap on education, employment, and the systems that directly affect youth aspirations.
Across 70%+ of all groups, examination fraud emerged as the single most emotionally charged issue — more potent than any ideological question. This became the strategic pivot for the client's entire messaging architecture for the youth segment.
Instagram is the primary news source, YouTube the fact-checking layer, WhatsApp the curated feed. This cohort wields disproportionate influence through algorithmic and social leverage. The entire channel plan had to be rebuilt.
A voter typology framework with distinct attitudinal clusters. Identification of the core vulnerability in positioning. State-level deep-dives translating national patterns into hyperlocal intelligence. The exam fraud finding became the centrepiece of the client's youth engagement strategy.
India's Scheduled Caste communities — over 200 million citizens — had never been the subject of a comprehensive, ground-up strategic intelligence exercise. We went to 16 locations across 10 states and sat with 13 distinct communities.
There are 13+ distinct communities with divergent political orientations. A Jatav in Rae Bareli is staunch pro-establishment. A Jatav in Hisar is staunch anti. The 6 neutral communities were the most strategically valuable battleground.
We built archetype frameworks — PM Modi perceived through 10 distinct archetypes. For Rahul Gandhi, 60% of communities rating him positively were voting for the Gandhi family legacy, not him as an individual. Only 22% had any opinion of him personally.
Within the most anti-establishment groups, we identified 4 pro-change cohorts: the Aspirational Youngster, the Rational Male, the Wise Old Man, and the Rooted Woman. Each was a crack — with a distinct targeting strategy.
The average SC household earns ₹10,000/month against a minimum need of ₹25,000 — a 150% gap. The community's daughters bear the most acute burden. This became the basis for a targeted policy recommendation.
11 actionable policy and communication recommendations. The community orientation matrix became the foundation of the client's micro-targeting strategy for the 2024 General Elections — the first time any political operation had community-level, location-specific intelligence on India's SC population.
ASBL was planning a landmark premium gated community in Hyderabad's CBD — a ₹500 crore bet where a wrong product-price decision is existential. Through deep qualitative immersion followed by rigorous pricing science, we replaced boardroom intuition with decision-grade intelligence.
Salaried professionals and business owners want fundamentally different things. Salaried buyers rank budget first; business owners rank luxury and status. Critically, salaried buyers care more about flexible payment plans than total price.
100% of respondents expressed surprise and excitement at the prospect of a large gated community with premium amenities in the CBD. Gated format commanded a measurable premium over standalone high-rise, independent of all other attributes.
A premium clubhouse was the single amenity with unanimous demand across all buyer profiles. Other amenities were "nice to have" that no one would actually pay for when forced to choose. This finding saved the client from over-investing.
CBD buyers have been burned before. The mother-in-law holds veto authority. The local bank manager can make or break a deal. The purchase decision is a trust navigation exercise mediated by family, community, and past trauma.
A complete pricing blueprint: launch price corridors for 3BHK and 4BHK, price elasticity curves, a premium levers playbook, and a simulation model. +91 Insights continues to serve as ASBL's fractional consumer insight and strategy team.
A four-generation Calcutta jewellery house facing a three-front crisis: family fissures, organised retail disruption from Tanishq and Kalyan, and a new generation of buyers. NCB needed to understand what the Indian jewellery consumer had become.
India's relationship with gems traces back to Vedic mythology — stones as divine ordinations, adornment as ritual transformation. Any brand strategy that treats Indian jewellery as a fashion category will build on sand. This became the bedrock of every strategic route.
The target constituency needs cultural warmth and community familiarity ("yeh toh ghar ke log hain") while simultaneously craving elevated experience ("Tata ka brand, cheat nahi karega"). NCB's heritage was the one asset Tanishq could never replicate.
First-generation global kids are the first influencers. Pragmatic parents are the real decision-makers. Guardian grandparents are the cultural compass. Every piece of communication must navigate this triad.
Local competitors were imitating mass retail codes when the real opportunity was to own premium boutique codes: mystery, handcraft, intensity, monochromatic restraint. This white space was wide open.
Four interconnected strategic routes — from tactical rebrand to an entirely new retail brand under the "House of NCB" halo. Presented not as competing options but as a phased continuum. The client received a decision architecture, not a recommendation.
A selection of the team's work across consumer insight, market immersion strategy and brand consultancy.
Cloud kitchens carried a consumer stigma — faceless, low-trust food. The brief: create digital-first food brands consumers would choose on their own merit.
Two launch-ready brand platforms with positioning, naming architecture, and go-to-market strategy.
Mahindra's brand was coded as hinterland, rugged, utilitarian — the opposite of what urban India's EV-curious buyer was looking for.
A repositioning framework reframing rugged capability as "engineered confidence" for urban consumers.
A vodka-first global company entering India's mass-premium whiskey category — no credentials, no cultural permission in a category tied to Indian masculine identity.
A complete Indian whiskey brand ready for market, exploiting the gap between incumbents' dated codes and emerging consumer desire.
Perceived as a content destination, not a technology product. The product — AI-powered portfolio management — was ahead of the brand.
Brand strategy repositioning ET Money around technology capability rather than content heritage.
Ambition to become the "SBI of the Digital Era" in a fundamentally low-trust digital payments category.
Brand positioning and trust architecture converting habitual users into loyal customers.
Thousands of schools powered, but no people-facing brand. With a unicorn funding round approaching, the gap between operations and credibility was a liability.
Unified brand platform with stakeholder-specific messaging for administrators, teachers, and parents.
Independent insight, cultural criticism, and strategic thinking — published on LinkedIn and Substack.
Why every pitch deck in Bangalore tells the same origin story — and what it reveals about aspirational India.
LinkedInDecoding the cultural logic of high-stakes purchase decisions in India's most commercially influential community.
SubstackThe ideological synthesis that breaks every existing political and consumer framework.
LinkedInMore pieces published regularly. Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest thinking.
Political Consultant · Brand Consultant · Consumer Insight Miner
PGDM-C in Brand and Media Management from MICA, Ahmedabad. Former brand strategist at Futurebrand, where he worked with major Indian brands across diverse categories and business life stages.
Represented The Economist's Thought Leadership Brand Solutions in India.
Served as brand, media, and communications consultant for a national political consultancy through the 2024 General Elections and multiple state assembly elections.
If your next decision needs Indian consumer intelligence behind it, we should be in a room together.