Say you comission some marketing research concentrating on a key question. You might be wondering why sales have not met targets. You might be wondering why you've lost reviews to key competitors. Or you might just want to know what customers see as your product's key offerings. I have read many of these reports, and I find them all lacking. For one, there is a shaky sense of cause and effect. Most documents will illustrate phenomena that the person comissioning the report already knew about. The causes for the phenomena are drawn with the fuzziest of magic markers, if they are drawn at all. The other thing missing is directed recommendations. The reports assume that the reader is the true expert in their field, and far better able to draw conclusions about what is actionable based on the info provided. All this really says is the person drawing the report needs to specialize some more so that they can call themselves an expert too.

If anyone has a truly great example of a marketing research report ( = causality is traced to the source, and conclusions are actionable) please send it to me as I would love to read it.

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