Bombay Shaving Company: A Gifting Research Study That Shaped Go-to-Market Strategy

Naman joined Bombay Shaving Company as a market research intern with a real business question on the table: should the brand launch a gifting proposition, and if yes, which product, occasion, channel, and audience to build it around. A product decision was riding on the research.

He started qualitative, deliberately. At that stage, he did not yet know what the right questions were, so he ran in-depth interviews with 20 users, split evenly by gender and by direction of gifting, men gifting to men and women gifting to men. He was deliberate about avoiding leading questions, wanting to surface the occasions and drivers users brought up themselves rather than confirm existing assumptions.

The gender split produced a sharp behavioral divergence. Women gifted across a wide set of occasions, Valentine's Day, Rakhi, birthdays, anniversaries, and accomplishment moments, and discovered brands through Google and Instagram search. Men, by contrast, gifted almost exclusively on birthdays and stuck to brands they already used themselves. The purchase drivers were equally distinct: women ranked personalization and packaging at the top, while men ranked utility and product quality.

Once the qualitative round had produced clear hypotheses, Naman moved to quantitative validation, structuring the drivers and occasions into a survey to test which patterns held at scale. The research moved from 20 anecdotes to statistically grounded findings.

The recommendations that came out of the study were concrete: lead with personalization and packaging when the buyer is a woman, build birthdays as the anchor use case, and for men, market to the existing customer database rather than spend on top-of-funnel awareness, because men gift brands they already trust. The leadership team acted on the findings, deciding to concentrate top-of-funnel marketing spend on the women segment while focusing on the existing database for men.