Humanizing Big Data

The Challenge

Helping a top multinational conglomerate foretell the future of India and predict how, where, and with whom their brands could grow.

One of the top multinational conglomerates in India was on a mission to strategically plan for the next decade. The Sound was commissioned to ethnographically explore the fastest-growing consumption centers to understand the cultural, economic and infrastructural forces impacting them, as well as the people living in and using these spaces.

The Approach

We spent time at the identified centers of growth and ethnographically recorded patterns of behavior and had conversations with the community living and working in the area. We selected the most interesting and aspirational stories of people we engaged with on the streets and conducted in-home interviews to get a deeper sense of their life journeys and future dreams. During the in-home ethnographies, we asked for 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.

The Impact

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 ESOMAR conference to showcase how the methodology could be used to help brands predict future consumption faster by first focusing on macro changes and then examining the micro details of people’s lives.