Skill reference: market-research-report

Skill reference: `market-research-report`

The market-research-report skill authors one document genre: a full ESOMAR/ISO 20252-style market research report — a client-facing deliverable that states the business question, discloses exactly how the evidence was gathered, presents the findings by objective, and draws recommendations that trace back to that evidence. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

Property	Value
Authors	A full ESOMAR/ISO 20252-style market research report
Purpose group	Research and market intelligence
MIF `conceptType`	`semantic`
Target MIF level	3
Primary source	ESOMAR-style market-research report convention (ethics/conduct code, not a report-format mandate)

What this document type is

A market research report is a client-facing deliverable that states a business question, discloses exactly how the evidence behind the answer was gathered, presents the findings organized by research objective, and closes with recommendations that trace back to that evidence. Its defining trait is the Methodology section’s sampling and fieldwork disclosure: an explicit sample frame, sampling method, and sample size, plus a fieldwork summary (mode, dates, response/completion rate). A report that presents findings without that disclosure is not a conformant market research report, no matter how polished the findings read.

The genre follows the widely-used ESOMAR-style report structure — Background & Objectives, Methodology, Findings, Conclusions & Recommendations, and a Technical Appendix. That structure is conventional practice, not a codified format standard: ESOMAR/ICC publishes an ethics and conduct code, not a report-format mandate, and the document must say so plainly rather than claim ESOMAR conformance. Any reference to ISO 20252 quality practice is anchored to “verify the current edition live at authoring time,” since the standard is under active revision.

This is distinct from a document that tracks a trajectory over time and projects it forward (a trend-analysis report), from one that ranks vendors on two evaluation axes (a competitive-quadrant report), and from a document that scopes what to build and why before design (a prd or feature-spec).

How the skill produces one

market-research-report is a genre skill: it carries the ESOMAR-style five-section pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a client-readable report and a machine-conformant unit.

Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes the five required sections — Background & Objectives, Methodology, Findings, Conclusions & Recommendations, Technical Appendix — and treats the Methodology section’s sampling and fieldwork disclosure as mandatory, not optional matter: an undisclosed sample limitation is a defect, not an omission. It requires every claim in Findings to trace to a cited source, requires verification verdicts to be reported (weakened or inconclusive findings are annotated rather than dropped; only falsified findings are excluded from the evidence base), and requires exhaustive coverage of the surviving evidence rather than a cherry-picked subset.
Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the Level-3 target), bad.md (a counter-example missing the Methodology sampling and fieldwork disclosure), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at Level 3.
MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of semantic, reflecting that the report is declarative study knowledge — objectives, methodology, findings, recommendations — not a time-bound event or a step sequence. mif-validate proves the Markdown ↔ JSON-LD round-trip is lossless before the document is considered done.

When it is beneficial

Reach for market-research-report when the deliverable is a complete market study for clients or stakeholders who must see the sampling basis, the fieldwork, and traceable evidence before they trust it — a business commissioning a study to decide whether and how to act, where the credibility of the recommendation rests on disclosed methodology as much as on the findings themselves.

Do not use it for tracking how something is changing and projecting it forward under uncertainty — that is trajectory-and-scenario work, not a fieldwork-and-sampling study of a market at a point in time. Do not use it for ranking vendors in a market on two evaluation axes (Completeness of Vision vs. Ability to Execute, four quadrants, per-vendor strengths and cautions) — that is a different comparative genre entirely, not a client study with disclosed sampling and fieldwork. Do not use it to scope what to build and why before design — that is a prd or feature-spec. If the alignment must be grounded in a comparison table of options against decision drivers rather than a fieldwork study, use engineering instead. The cost is discipline: a report that skips the sampling and fieldwork disclosure, or silently drops a surviving finding, is not a conformant market research report.

Example

A market research report titled “Household Adoption of AI-Assisted Grocery List Apps (U.S., 2026)” opens with the commissioning client’s business question — whether to integrate an AI-assisted grocery-list feature into a loyalty app — and four research objectives. The Methodology section discloses a stratified random sample (n = 1,050, stratified by Census region and income tercile) from a national online panel, a 22-item questionnaire, and fieldwork run 2026-01-15 to 2026-02-02 with a 27.4% completion rate; it also records that one analyst projection was falsified against the observed adoption curve and excluded, while a price-sensitivity finding was weakened by conflicting qualitative signal and retained with an explicit uncertainty flag. Findings report 41% adoption incidence against 78% awareness, a segment-comparison table with weighted margins of error rendered alongside a mermaid xychart-beta bar chart, and the leading non-adopter barriers. Conclusions & Recommendations name the awareness-to-trial gap as the primary obstacle and recommend a phased launch targeting the highest-adoption segment. The Technical Appendix repeats the sampling, instrument, and fieldwork detail in full and states the ESOMAR convention-not-standard caveat.

Provenance & citations

Genre source — ESOMAR-style market-research report convention: the widely-used industry structure for client-facing market studies, https://esomar.org/; ESOMAR/ICC publishes an ethics and conduct code, not a report-format mandate, so the document states that caveat rather than claiming ESOMAR conformance.
Quality-practice reference — ISO 20252: market, opinion, and social research quality-management practice, checked against the current edition live at authoring time since the standard is under active revision, https://www.iso.org/standard/73671.html.
Skill provenance: authored by the market-research-report skill in the mif-docs plugin, https://github.com/modeled-information-format/mif-docs-plugin; the skill’s exemplars and evals/ define and verify the pattern.
MIF conformance: the document projects to canonical JSON-LD under the MIF specification, https://mif-spec.dev, and is proven lossless by mif-validate.
Index: this skill is one entry in the skills by purpose catalog.