New Delhi, April 13 -- There is a quiet crisis in how brands understand their consumers.

Every year, Indian enterprises spend hundreds of crores on market research, surveys, focus groups, tracking studies, in pursuit of a single, elusive thing: the truth about what consumers want. And yet, the insights that come back are often months old by the time they reach a decision-maker. They are shaped by respondents who game the system, skewed by sampling that mistakes familiarity for representation, and diluted by the sheer noise of a data ecosystem overrun by bots and incentivised responses.

The problem is not a lack of data. It is a lack of trustworthy data - gathered fast enough to matter.

India's market research and insights industry reac...