Before a single unit was sold, the vehicle didn't even have the right name — or a price anyone had tested. Both had to come from how people actually used it, not how engineers had designed it.
Bajaj had built something genuinely new — a passenger vehicle with a three-wheeler engine but four wheels, the first quadricycle of its kind for the Indian market. That created two unresolved problems at once: what should this vehicle mean to the people who'd actually drive or ride in it, and what should it cost. Neither question had an obvious answer, because there was no existing category to benchmark against.
Rather than asking people to react to the new vehicle in the abstract, we first dug into Bajaj's existing R&D research and conducted car clinics exploring how and when people choose autos over taxis (and vice versa). That groundwork let us compile a list of 120 distinct occasions where a taxi or auto might come into play — daily commutes, family trips, quick errands, and everything between.
We then put real customers in the vehicle for test rides, and asked them, occasion by occasion, which of those 120 situations they could see themselves using it for. This wasn't a hypothetical preference question — it was customers experiencing the product and telling us, in their own context, where it actually fit.
Mapping functional, emotional, and "laddered" benefits across all 120 occasions revealed a consistent emotional thread running underneath the practical ones: a sense of cuteness — small, easy, low-friction moments like a mother and child quickly hopping in and out for a short trip.
For pricing, we ran a parallel exercise with auto drivers — the people who'd actually operate these vehicles commercially. Test drives let us gather real data on their expected daily trip count and passenger capacity. We then applied the Van Westendorp pricing model, layered with direct questions on willingness to pay, to triangulate the price point the market would actually bear.
The vehicle launched at the price point the research recommended — and under a name the research had effectively written itself.