This Anthro Life

Dr. Meena Kaushik takes us through her story from the revolutionary idea in the late 1970s of applying semiotics to brand and market research to founding Quantum, which today is a global enterprise research organization in seven countries, through how they have digitally adapted insights research in the face of COVID.Meena Kaushik started her journey as an academic studying the symbolism of death rituals in Hinduism. She conducted extensive fieldwork amongst the Doms of Varanasi, a low caste community working in the city’s cremation grounds, for her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.She ventured into qualitative market research by accident and fell in love. Her training in ethnography deepened how consumer behaviour, consumer culture and consumer psyche were being understood in India in the mid to late 1980s.A consulting stint with the Indian Market Research Bureau soon became a full fledged position and she helped found the qualitative division at MARG as a Director of Qualitative Research.