market-research-report

Produces a full 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. Its center of gravity is the Methodology section's sampling and fieldwork disclosure — a report that presents findings without disclosing the sample frame, method, size, and fieldwork basis is not a conformant market research report, no matter how polished the findings read.

This genre follows the widely-used ESOMAR-style market-research report structure. That structure is conventional practice, not a codified format standard — ESOMAR/ICC publishes an ethics/conduct code, not a report-format mandate, and the report must say so plainly rather than claim ESOMAR conformance.

Pattern (industry: ESOMAR/ISO 20252-style market research report)

1. Background & Objectives — the commissioning context, the business problem, the research objectives, and the scope and definitions of the market under study.
2. Methodology — research design, sampling (frame, method, size), the instrument (questionnaire / discussion guide), and fieldwork (mode, dates, response/completion rate). State the verification gate and how falsified and weakened findings were handled.
3. Findings — the evidence, organized by objective or theme. Every claim traces to a cited source and reports its verification verdict. Quantify where the data allows, and include a comparative table whenever multiple segments or sources are measured on shared attributes.
4. Conclusions & Recommendations — what the findings mean for the business question, and specific, actionable recommendations, each traceable to the evidence that supports it.
5. Technical Appendix — full methodology detail (sampling and weighting, instrument, fieldwork log), data-quality and limitations notes, and ISO 20252 quality notes.

Rules that keep it a market research report

• The Methodology section's sampling and fieldwork disclosure is mandatory, not optional matter — an explicit sample frame, method, and size, plus a fieldwork summary (mode, dates, response/completion rate). An undisclosed sample limitation is a defect, not an omission.
• Every claim in Findings is traceable to a cited source; no orphan facts.
• Report verification verdicts: annotate weakened or inconclusive findings rather than silently dropping them; exclude only falsified findings from the evidence base (they may be named in Methodology as excluded, never presented as evidence).
• Exhaustive coverage: build Findings from the full surviving evidence — every surviving finding gets its own treatment, never condensed to a cherry-picked subset. A silently dropped finding is a defect.
• Include a comparative table whenever multiple segments or sources are measured on shared attributes; number and caption every table and figure and reference it in the text. Render any chart or diagram as a fenced mermaid code block (a market chart as xychart-beta or pie) — never ASCII art, an image link, or Graphviz/DOT. Plain tabular matter stays a Markdown table. A required figure is never silently omitted — if the data cannot support it, say so in prose.
• State the convention-not-standard caveat. ESOMAR/ICC is an ethics/conduct code, not a codified report-format standard; a report that claims "ESOMAR conformance" is a defect. Anchor any ISO 20252 reference to "verify the current edition live at authoring time" — the standard is under active revision (2024-2026) — rather than baking a specific edition in as fact.
• Hedge uncertain claims and present ranges when sources disagree; disclose the sampling and fieldwork basis honestly.

Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for

• Tracking how something is changing and projecting it forward under uncertainty — that is trend-analysis: trajectory, signals, drivers, and scenarios over a time horizon, not a fieldwork-and-sampling study of a market at a point in time.
• Ranking vendors in a market on two evaluation axes — that is competitive-quadrant: Completeness of Vision vs. Ability to Execute, four quadrants, per-vendor strengths/cautions, not a client study with disclosed sampling and fieldwork.
• What to build and why, before design — that is prd or feature-spec.

MIF frontmatter

type: semantic — a market research report is declarative study knowledge (objectives, methodology, findings, recommendations), not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with namespace (market-research-report/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1.

Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here

The same document still reads as a client-facing market research report and projects losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.

The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)

This genre ships the same report at two MIF levels so the climb is explicit:

• templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A complete, valid market research report, but opaque to a machine consumer.
• templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance, citations[] tied to the findings, and a typed relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to a follow-on trend-analysis report).

Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a report that presents findings and recommendations with no Methodology sampling or fieldwork disclosure at all — the genre's single most load-bearing requirement, missing.