Abstract: Annapurna Kitchens, a Pune-based packaged foods company, launched Masala Mornings, a ready-to-cook breakfast range, in three Indian cities. A survey shows 78% of trial buyers like the product, yet only 11% buy it again. A ₹40 crore national rollout is planned for the Diwali quarter, and Head of Consumer Insights Meera Iyer has six weeks to explain the gap. The company has already spent ₹1.15 crore on primary research, much of it never analysed. An agency proposes a ₹58 lakh, ten-week programme combining in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, card sorting, the Five Whys and a Delphi study. An in-house researcher counters with an ₹8 lakh, four-week lean version built on existing data. Students must weigh rigour against cost and time, spot sunk-cost reasoning, match elicitation methods to research questions, and see why documentation decides whether research gets used. The case suits postgraduate courses in business research methods and qualitative marketing research.
Teaching objectives (what the instructor aims to do)
- Introduce five qualitative elicitation methods (in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, card sorting, the Five Whys and the Delphi technique) and the kind of insight each one produces.
- Bring out the trade-off between rigour, cost and time in designing qualitative research.
- Show sunk-cost reasoning in a research budget decision, and introduce the idea of the value of additional information.
- Show that good documentation (coding, evidence logs, audit trails) is what turns collected data into usable insight.
- Give students a decision forum where they must defend a research plan under real budget and deadline limits.
Learning objectives (by the end of the session, students will be able to)
- Match each of the five elicitation methods to the research questions it answers best, and name its typical biases.
- Compare full and lean or remote versions of each method, and judge what insight is lost and what is kept.
- Distinguish money already spent from the next research spend, and assess whether more information is worth its cost.
- Extract working hypotheses from existing data, such as open-ended comments, reviews and call records, before commissioning new primary research.
- Design a staged research plan with a method sequence, a budget and stop-go criteria.
- Develop a documentation protocol (codebook, evidence log, traceability rules) that makes small-sample qualitative findings credible to decision-makers.
