Discovery, research and purchase used to be a journey measured in days or weeks. At DigiPlus Fest 2026, Consuma’s Siddhartha Sharma argued that the journey is now measured in minutes, and that brands need research that can keep up.
The old speed-depth trade-off is breaking
Sharma, head of sales at Consuma, described a shopper who finds a product in an Instagram feed, checks reviews on another platform and completes a quick-commerce purchase almost immediately. As he put it, “This entire cycle of discovery, decision, and action happens in less than a few minutes.”
Traditional research, he said, has long forced brands to choose. Social listening tools offer speed but shallow context; full-scale studies from firms such as Nielsen or Kantar deliver depth but move more slowly. Those two strengths have rarely sat in the same workflow.
What Consuma is proposing
The platform is designed to close that gap. It pulls in multi-format digital data and uses an AI-powered research engine to return insights within minutes.
- Ingests video, audio, text and image content rather than one data type.
- Analyses each format contextually, not just through keywords and mentions.
- Uses a multi-agent framework to turn research questions into decision-ready answers.
- Spots emerging consumption occasions and behavioural shifts at a category level.
That changes the central question from “what are people saying?” to something closer to “what new occasions are opening up in our category?” — and the answer can arrive while the trend is still forming.
Where it has moved the needle
Sharma cited an automotive study across four countries. The goal was to identify new and emerging purchase drivers. The platform surfaced 20 drivers and plotted them against local and universal drivers. The automaker, which had not run a similar study in more than two decades, used the output to pivot its strategy.
He also pointed to consumer packaged goods work where contextual analysis of social video revealed previously overlooked consumption occasions. Instead of counting mentions, the team mapped the context in which a brand was being used and defined a new occasion for it.
Why marketers should care
When a purchase journey compresses to minutes, the insights that feed campaign briefs, media plans and innovation pipelines need to compress too. A quarterly tracker with a six-week report may still answer big brand-health questions, but it will not catch a consumption occasion that is emerging this month on short video.
Rapid research works best as an always-on layer: start with a sharp category question, pull multi-format signals, request contextual readouts, and route findings into creative and media decisions before the moment cools.
Source: ETBrandEquity.com
