Five findings that unlocked the category's biggest fixable barrier
A leading FMCG conglomerate with a plateaued packaged milkshake business
A leading FMCG conglomerate with a strong presence in dairy-based beverages needed a comprehensive consumption study to understand the behavioural patterns driving milkshake usage. The category had grown in awareness and distribution, but volume growth had plateaued.
The brand needed to know whether the plateau was an occasion problem, a perception problem, or a product problem, and where the most commercially addressable lever sat.
Six questions that defined the research
A consumption study built to map occasion, motivation, and the real competitive set
Flickly fielded a quantitative consumer study among confirmed milkshake consumers across urban India, covering consumption timing, motivations, social context, food pairing, and a parallel substitution module mapping what consumers reach for instead.
Quantitative consumption study
A quantitative consumer study among confirmed milkshake consumers across urban India, representing the flavoured milk and milkshake category.
Occasion and motivation mapping
The study covered consumption timing, motivations, social context, food pairing, and occasion mapping to identify the highest-opportunity consumption windows.
Health perception benchmarking
Milkshakes were benchmarked against competing beverage categories, including colas, cold coffee, energy drinks, and packaged juices, on perceived healthiness.
Substitution mapping
A parallel substitution module mapped the competitive set consumers trade against when they don't choose a milkshake.
Taste wins the first purchase. Functional benefits win the repeat
- Taste leads consumption motivations, but energy, nutrition, and thirst-quenching are genuine, underexploited credibility milkshakes already have.
- The category peaks at 45% in the late afternoon, with mid-morning at 43% equally significant, both high-pairing-intent snacking moments.
- Milkshakes score 3.98 out of 5 on health perception, above cold coffee, packaged juices, energy drinks, and all carbonated beverages.
- Too much sugar is the single largest barrier at 46%, more than twice the weight of price, a structural contradiction one credible reduced-sugar move can resolve.
- The real competitor to milkshakes in India is lassi and packaged juice, not cola, reframing the entire competitive positioning conversation.
