Sourced Indian marketing cases
Start with a published Indian company or industry fact, then work through a marketing decision. The example calculations identify their fictional inputs.
Hindustan Unilever · Give each brand a role
HUL reported more than 50 brands across 15 categories in its FY 2024–25 performance highlights. This establishes portfolio breadth. The figures do not reveal how individual shoppers switch among brands.
How should an Indian FMCG team test whether a premium pack adds portfolio value?
Reveal the step-by-step solution
- Define the pack’s buyer and occasion, then identify the closest sibling and competitor products in the same stores.
- Run a matched-store pilot and classify volume as new-to-category, switched from competitors or transferred from a sibling. Use transaction or panel data to validate the classification.
- Calculate incremental portfolio contribution. With fictional inputs, 1,000 packs at ₹40 contribution less 600 displaced sibling packs at ₹30 each leaves ₹22,000 before launch costs.
Continue only where incremental contribution covers launch costs and the premium pack reaches the intended buyer. The calculation is a teaching example and uses no internal HUL data.
UPI · Turn adoption data into a merchant test
NPCI publishes UPI product and ecosystem statistics, including state-level data. Transaction volume counts payment events. A single merchant or customer can generate many events.
A payments provider wants more neighbourhood merchants to use digital checkout regularly. How should it choose a pilot and measure success?
Reveal the step-by-step solution
- Use official statistics to select areas for discovery, then count eligible merchants locally. Interview owners to find barriers such as staff training, reconciliation or refund handling.
- Randomize eligible merchants to standard onboarding or assisted setup. Define activation as receiving a real payment and continued use as transacting in a later week.
- With fictional results of 140 active merchants out of 400 offered help and 108 out of 400 controls, the lift is 8 percentage points, or 32 additional active merchants. At ₹16,000 incremental cost, the cost per added active merchant is ₹500.
Compare ₹500 with expected retained merchant contribution and check support burden and complaints. Re-run in a second area before assuming the result generalizes.
TRAI data · Size the right customer base
TRAI reported 1,258,769,347 wireless subscriptions as of 31 December 2025. The count includes wireless mobile and fixed wireless access connections, including cellular machine-to-machine connections.
Can a local router-servicing company use that national figure to estimate customer demand?
Reveal the step-by-step solution
- Define one city, household routers and annual paid repair visits. The national wireless subscription count has a different geography and unit.
- Obtain city-level estimates for occupied households and home broadband penetration, then validate router breakdown and service uptake with local installer data.
- With fictional inputs of 600,000 homes, 45% with home broadband, 10% needing a repair and 50% using paid service, the estimate is 13,500 annual visits. At ₹800 per visit, category revenue is ₹1.08 crore.
Apply your actual service footprint and expected share before turning category demand into a revenue forecast. Test sensitivity to the repair rate and willingness to pay.