How to write an Effective Market Research Brief

Market is defined as the systematic and objective collection and interpretation of data to help reduce risk in marketing decisions. In order for marketing research to effectively address identified marketing problems, the problem definition must be clearly spelt out. This means before you put pen to paper to write a research brief you need to be clear on what you want to achieve by carrying out market research survey.

This means you need to have a well defined marketing problem, with clear and concise objectives. There are several reasons why companies conduct market research; a company may decide to do market research to identify opportunities for business growth and expansion. A good research brief must clearly address the following elements:

Research Background – under this section you need to give a brief synopsis of the company and its product portfolio. This should be detailed enough to give enough information to the researcher to understand your company and what business it is involved in.

Research Objectives – every research project should have defined and explicit objectives which clearly states why the research is being carried out. All other aspects of planning and carrying out the research flow from these objectives; in other words if they do not contribute towards achieving the objectives they almost certainly should not be undertaken. The objective should relate to the marketing decision which will have to be made or the problem that needs a solution (and decision).

Remember a problem well defined or understood is a problem half solved. Your research objectives must be clear and well articulated, to ensure the core issues of the marketing problem are well understood by the researchers. Remember if the research objectives are not well defined, the research output will not address the marketing problem, thus the information will not be useful.

Research Scope – This section you need to again clearly define the research scope in terms of geographical coverage, sample size and your target respondents. You need to be as precise as possible to ensure when the research is done the researchers will be able to speak to the right respondents, i.e. your target market. It is important to be precise with regards to target respondents in terms of descriptor variables. Specify age, gender, Income level, Religion, Social Economic Class and residential status i.e. high or low density locations, Urbanization i.e. urban, semi urban or rural.

Research Methodology – Depending on your level of market research knowledge, you can suggest the methodology you would like the researchers to apply. But if you are not very sure, it is important to ask the research agency to propose a suitable methodology that will help in addressing the marketing problem.

Action Standards – Under this section you will state what you intend to do with the research output. For instance if you are conducting a customer satisfaction survey, you may use the research output to come up with a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI), which you will be tracking over time.

Having stated the above, I think you should be able to get a good proposal from a research agency clearly stating how they would be able to address your marketing problem. In the next post I will be talking about what a good market research proposal should address in response to a market research brief. As usual your comments and suggestions are welcome.

To your Success!!!!