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How a consumer behaviour study identified a 44% addressable market for Creston's India entry

Flickly Insights mapped the smart TV purchase journey across Indian metros, identifying where incumbent brands are losing consumers and precisely where Creston can win.

Explore the findingsExplore the findings

Four findings that shaped Creston's go-to-market strategy

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Addressable segmentBrand-open, near-term buyers targeting mid-premium or above
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Unprompted complaintNamed speed, lag, or startup time as the single thing they would change
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Willingness to pay moreWould pay Rs. 4,000–6,000 above budget for faster startup performance
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Open to new brandsBrand heritage is not a meaningful barrier to entry in this category

A TV brand entering one of Asia's most competitive consumer electronics markets

The Client

Creston is a television brand positioning for commercial launch in India's mid-premium and premium segment. The market is defined by Samsung and Sony's combined dominance, a digitally-native buyer base, and an accelerating shift to streaming-first consumption.

The Brief

Before committing to a market entry strategy, Creston needed answers to four questions: who is actually buying in this segment, what drives their decisions, where are current brands falling short, and how large is the segment realistically winnable.

Four questions that defined the research

The buyer
Who is actually buying TVs in this segment?
The decision
What drives their purchase decisions?
The gap
Where are current brands falling short?
The opportunity
How large is the segment Creston can realistically win?

A structured quantitative study designed to surface what consumers do not say on their own

The study was commissioned to generate a decision-ready view of consumer behaviour across the TV purchase journey in India. Flickly designed a CAWI survey built around five strategic objectives defined by Creston, covering usage behaviour, the purchase journey, feature priorities, performance pain points, and brand openness.

01

Survey architecture

A structured funnel covering screener, usage, purchase history, feature priorities, ownership experience, future intent, and brand openness. Two mandatory entry gates ensured all responses reflected genuine commercial behaviour.

02

Organic pain-point capture

Performance frustration was probed indirectly. Open-ended complaints were captured before any satisfaction scales were introduced, eliminating priming bias on the study's most commercially sensitive insight area.

03

Audience and reach

Purchase decision-makers and household influencers aged 20 to 45, classified as NCCS A and B, across major Indian metros and select Tier 2 cities. Fielded and completed within 48 to 72 hours via Flickly's verified consumer panel.

04

Addressable segment construction

The commercially relevant segment required three simultaneous conditions: openness to an unfamiliar brand, near-term purchase intent within 12 months, and a stated budget at mid-premium or above. This three-way filter produced Creston's highest-priority first audience.

Samsung and Sony's largest customers are also their most frustrated

  • Samsung holds 43% ownership share and leads brand consideration at 73%, yet 25.4% of its owners report performance frustration often or very often.
  • Sony registers 20.0% at the same frequency. LG sits at 4.3%. The six-fold gap between Samsung and LG points to a concentrated and identifiable pool of switchable consumers.
  • 28% of respondents named speed, lag, or startup time as the one thing they would change about their current TV, the largest single theme in the study.
  • Speed is the defining unmet need in a category marketed on display specifications while underdelivering on software experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Consumer expectations are being fundamentally reshaped by the transition from broadcast-centric usage to streaming-first behaviour. Televisions are no longer evaluated purely as display devices but as integrated digital platforms where operating system performance, app ecosystem fluidity, and responsiveness define perceived quality. This shift elevates experiential factors such as speed and interface design from secondary considerations to critical determinants of satisfaction and brand switching.
High satisfaction scores often mask what can be described as normalised or tolerated dissatisfaction. Consumers adapt to category-wide limitations and report acceptable experiences until presented with a materially superior alternative. This creates a latent demand environment where innovation that visibly solves a known but under-articulated pain point can trigger disproportionate shifts in preference and purchase intent.
The purchase journey is now predominantly digitally mediated, with discovery, evaluation, and validation occurring across e-commerce platforms and video-based content ecosystems. Consumer decision-making is increasingly influenced by aggregated reviews, comparative demonstrations, and creator-led evaluations. This compresses the funnel, making visibility and credibility within these ecosystems more influential than traditional retail presence alone.
Stated preferences typically reflect rationalised, top-of-mind attributes such as picture quality or brand reputation. However, willingness-to-pay captures experiential learning accumulated post-purchase. Consumers may not initially prioritise certain attributes, but once they encounter friction in real usage, these attributes gain economic significance. This divergence highlights the importance of distinguishing between pre-purchase cognition and post-usage valuation.
Market entry strategies should focus less on replicating incumbent strengths and more on exploiting their systemic weaknesses. Large incumbents often accumulate dissatisfaction at scale, creating identifiable switching cohorts. A challenger brand that offers a sharply differentiated, experience-led proposition and validates it through credible digital channels can penetrate consideration sets without requiring equivalent brand equity.
A high-conversion segment is typically characterised by the convergence of three factors: near-term purchase intent, economic capacity within a defined price band, and openness to brand substitution. When these conditions align, the segment becomes disproportionately responsive to differentiated value propositions. Precision targeting of such cohorts yields significantly higher efficiency than broad-based awareness strategies.

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