Research briefs — going from a question to a decision-ready answer
The problem
Research the market for organic snacks in India. Six hours later you have forty tabs, three conflicting market-size figures, and no clearer view than when you started. Or you ask AI, get 900 tidy words in ninety seconds, and cannot verify a single number in it.
What you need
DECISION: Should we launch an organic namkeen line at ₹99 for 150g into modern trade in Maharashtra in the next 12 months? WHY: ₹40 lakh in tooling and first inventory; we are a ₹6 crore snack business currently in general trade only.
The tool
Perplexity, or browsing-enabled assistants
The prompt
What comes back
1. QUESTION RESTATED — Can an unlisted ₹6 crore GT snack brand win modern-trade shelf space in Maharashtra for a premium organic SKU at a 120% price premium over its own GT product, within 12 months, on a ₹40 lakh budget?
Verify before you use it
- Open the certification link. If it does not resolve or does not say what is claimed, treat the whole brief as suspect.
- Note that four of five conditions are assumptions, not facts. That is the honest result here — a brief that presented them as facts would have been more comfortable and far more dangerous.
- The shelf audit cannot be done by AI and the brief says so. Any research output that claims to know what is on a Maharashtra shelf is fabricating.
- Check the recommendation against your own deadline pressure. 'The decision is not ready' is often correct and is rarely what the board wants to hear.