Granular Consumers Need Granular Data
Festive marketing decisions are often made on broad, backward-looking signals. But consumers, categories, brands and cities rarely move together.
Media is committed. Inventory reaches stores. Offers are finalised. Distribution gets strengthened. Automobiles, appliances, fashion, jewellery, food, and almost every other consumer category prepare for the surge.
Most of these decisions draw heavily on the previous year’s data for the brand, or, when that is unavailable, the category. Usually, these data points measure past sales or some proxy for sales.
Vehicle registrations tell us how automobiles sold. UPI data shows transaction volumes and values. Retailers see sales and footfalls. Trade bodies eventually estimate the size of festive business.
All useful information. But all of it describes something that has already happened. That leaves an important gap in the weeks before the festive peak: How keen are consumers to buy right now?
Plenty of signals, less measurement
Marketers are naturally not flying blind. They have search behaviour, enquiries, wishlists, past festive patterns, dealer feedback and their own customer data.
But all data does not inform equally. A rise in searches for televisions cannot readily be compared with changing interest in automobiles. Brand enquiries in Mumbai do not tell us whether buying readiness is moving similarly in Bengaluru. A national consumer sentiment number can hide large differences between categories, brands and cities.
What brands really need is information about their own brand from the consumer’s point of view. What has changed since the last festive season? What has changed since the last quarter? And, most importantly, how is it changing as the festive season progresses?
Few marketers are going to commission repeated primary research every month for five or six months just to answer these questions. So, approximation naturally creeps in.
Last year’s numbers. Dealer conversations. Search trends. Sales-team feedback. A few dashboards. Some instinct. Individually, each may be useful. Put together, they often become the marketing equivalent of a back-of-the-sticky-note calculation.
And when large festive investments are riding on those sticky notes, the approximation begins to matter significantly. The old advertising adage was that half the money works; the problem is knowing which half.
The data problem is not very different.
August is a good example
India Buying Intent stood at 98.80 in August 2026, down from 99.40 in July.
At first glance, that suggests a small easing in buying readiness. Look below the national number and the picture changes completely. Of the 35 super-categories measured, 18 declined during August. Yet several important consumer categories moved up. Technology rose from 6.3 to 7.1, Automobile from 10.3 to 10.9, and Consumer Appliances from 2.4 to 2.9.
Consumers are not moving together. They rarely do. But knowing the current convergences or divergences can help explain the reasons behind a campaign’s success.
That is particularly important during a high-spend festive season. A national average can soften while individual categories strengthen, as is currently the case.
Within the same category, brands can move in completely different directions. Cities can behave differently too. Go one level deeper to city-zones and the differences can become sharper still.
That level of granularity is often dismissed as “too much detail”, particularly when the conversation eventually reaches the CFO. But if the consumer is granular, the data informing brands needs to be granular too.
The useful window is before the sale
Sales data answers the essential question: What did people buy? It can sometimes help explain why they bought it too. Buying Intent comes one step earlier. It asks: Where is the consumer’s keenness to buy moving?
That may be the more useful question for a marketer because it is still influenceable. Marketing cannot control sales. Price, distribution, availability, financing, competitive action and several other factors finally determine whether a transaction takes place.
What marketing can meaningfully influence is the consumer’s inclination towards the brand.
Take almost any marketing objective through the Five Whys method. Dig deep enough and, sooner rather than later, most of these roads will roughly lead to the same place: how to create greater keenness-to-buy in the consumer.
Or alternatively, Buying Intent.
The festive season does not suffer from a lack of data. We become extremely good at measuring what consumers did after they did it. The bigger opportunity is to understand what they are becoming keen to do while the brand can still influence the outcome.
Better than the adman’s adage, the new-age marketing change in data view should be: if a consumer is granular, so should the data about them be.