Who decides what an Indian household buys again?

Picture a new cooking oil. A son orders it online for his parents’ home, because the ads promised it was lighter. His mother cooks with it every morning. She finds it smokes more than her old oil, says nothing to him, and by next month the old brand is back in the kitchen.

The brand has the son’s phone number, his email and his order. As far as its data can tell, the launch went fine.

Five people in every purchase

A household purchase is rarely one person’s decision.

Someone notices the product: on a screen, at a friend’s place, on a shelf. Someone decides to try it. Someone pays. Someone uses it every day. And almost anyone in the house can refuse it, without ever saying so. Sometimes these are all the same person. In a lot of Indian homes, with parents, children and sometimes grandparents under one roof, they aren’t.

The daily user might be a parent who cooks, a teenager who won’t touch the new shampoo, or, in some homes, the help who uses the floor cleaner every day. The one who can refuse might be the youngest person in the house. None of them placed the order.

The person a brand can reach is the one who pays

Every channel a brand has points at the buyer.

The order, the delivery message, the review request and the WhatsApp check-in from the brand’s team all go to the person who paid. That’s natural: it’s the only contact a brand has. But it means the feedback a brand collects is mostly the buyer’s view of a product someone else may be using. I wrote about what that means for feedback on WhatsApp in Is WhatsApp feedback enough to know if your product works?

Even the people deciding together see it differently

Two people in the same kind of home can describe the same decision in different ways.

India’s National Family Health Survey asked married women and men who decides major household purchases. Only 7.4 percent of women said they mainly decide alone, while 24.2 percent of men said they do. The survey asked about major purchases, not groceries, but the point carries: ask one person how a decision was made, and you get one version of it. I’ve written about the household under one roof in How do you hear from customers who never leave a review?

Hear from the person who uses it

If you’ve learned that someone else decides, the next step is to hear from that person, not about them.

This is the part founders often skip, and I understand why. The buyer is the one you can reach, and asking them “what did everyone else think?” feels like enough. It helps, and it’s a good first question. But a secondhand answer is still the buyer’s version. The mother in the opening would tell you about the smoke in thirty seconds. Her son might not even know.

So when you talk to customers, ask who in the house actually uses the product, and whether you can hear from them directly. When someone stops ordering, ask who stopped it. And when you plan a launch, picture the person who will use it every morning, not only the one who will click “buy”.

What this means for your brand

The buyer starts the purchase, and the household decides whether it continues. Hear from the people who live with your product, not only the person who paid for it. Foydy’s read comes from people who fit your buyer, using your product in their own homes for two weeks, where others in the house may use it too, and tells you whether they would buy it again, at what price, and why.