Market Research Reports

Market Research Reports

Purpose

Create decision-focused market reports whose claims, calculations, assumptions, and uncertainties can be audited. Match depth and format to the question and evidence. There is no required length, chapter count, visual count, or output format.

Do not:

• imitate or imply affiliation with a consulting, analyst, or research brand;
• invent citations, quotes, market shares, or paid-market figures;
• present TAM/SAM/SOM or a forecast as one certain truth;
• treat a framework, chart, or fluent narrative as evidence;
• provide investment, legal, antitrust, tax, accounting, or regulatory advice.

Operating principles

1. Define before sizing. Fix product, customer, geography, channel, period, measure, unit, denominator, currency/base year, and taxonomy.
2. Map every claim. Every factual or quantitative claim has a claim ID and exact source IDs.
3. Separate statement types. Distinguish facts, estimates, calculations, forecasts, opinions, and recommendations.
4. Prefer primary evidence. Use official statistics, regulator records, filed company disclosures, and transparent original studies before secondary synthesis.
5. Preserve uncertainty. Retain source conflicts, revisions, scenario ranges, sensitivity, and limitations.
6. Keep methods reproducible. Use local structured inputs and deterministic calculations when practical.
7. Collect lawfully and ethically. No deception, PII disclosure, access circumvention, confidential material, or trade-secret acquisition.

Workflow

1. Establish the research contract

Clarify:

• decision, audience, deadline, and materiality threshold;
• formal market definition and adjacent exclusions;
• buyer, payer, user, transaction, and value-chain level;
• geography and treatment of imports, exports, and channels;
• historical period, forecast period, and retrieval cutoff;
• revenue/expenditure, gross output/value added, units, capacity, users, or another measure;
• stock/flow, gross/net, taxes, and denominator;
• currency, base year, and nominal/real/current/constant basis;
• industry and product classification with version;
• permitted data sources, primary research, confidentiality, and output format.

Ask a focused question when a missing choice would materially change the denominator or result. Otherwise state a provisional scope and proceed.

Use references/report_structure_guide.md for modular report design.

2. Build the evidence plan

Route each question to the source closest to the underlying event:

1. primary law, regulator decision, official filing, or official statistic;
2. original company filing or attributable first-party disclosure;
3. transparent survey/study with inspectable methods;
4. institutional or peer-reviewed research using identifiable primary data;
5. industry association data with disclosed coverage;
6. reputable secondary synthesis;
7. lawfully accessed paid estimate with inspectable scope and method;
8. news/commentary for leads or attributable events.

For company data, prefer the official filing system in the relevant jurisdiction. For industry, labor, prices, population, trade, and national accounts, prefer the responsible national statistical agency or central bank. For cross-country work, use harmonized World Bank, IMF, OECD, or Eurostat data only after checking definitions and original-source lineage.

Read references/official_data_sources.md before using public APIs. API rules and limits are a dated snapshot: verify current official terms before automated or high-volume retrieval. Never put an API key in a report or bundled script.

3. Create the source ledger

Assign stable IDs (S-001, S-002, ...). Record:

• title, publisher, URL/persistent ID, source type;
• publication date and retrieval date;
• original producer when accessed through an aggregator;
• geography, covered population, period, and vintage;
• currency, base year, price basis, measure type, unit, and denominator;
• taxonomy and version;
• preliminary/revised/final/current status;
• method, sample, imputation, suppression, and limitations;
• license/terms and lawful local snapshot path.

Use assets/source_ledger_template.csv and validate it:

python3 scripts/validate_evidence_ledger.py data/source_ledger.csv

If publication date is unavailable, record not-stated; do not guess.

4. Maintain a claims ledger

Assign IDs (C-001, ...). Keep the exact claim text, statement type, source IDs, report location, as-of date, geography, currency/base, measure/unit, taxonomy, revision status, confidence, calculation ID, and assumption IDs.

Rules:

• one end-of-paragraph citation does not support unrelated sentences;
• split compound claims that rely on different evidence;
• a calculation cites its inputs, not a source that never published the result;
• an aggregator and its original source are not independent corroboration;
• an interview theme is not population prevalence;
• absence of public feature evidence means unknown, not no.

Audit mappings:

python3 scripts/audit_claim_citations.py \
  data/claims.csv data/source_ledger.csv

See references/evidence_model.md.

5. Size the market as scenarios

Measurement guardrails

Give every component a disjoint coverage_key and one shared denominator_id. Do not add:

• manufacturer revenue to distributor or end-customer spend;
• production, imports, and sales without trade/inventory reconciliation;
• parent and subsidiary revenue;
• bundles and their included components;
• gross output and value added;
• installed-base stock and annual transaction flow;
• overlapping customer or geographic segments.

Use product classifications and supply-use logic when industry codes are too broad. Preserve an unknown/residual category instead of forcing totals.

Top-down and bottom-up

Compute independently:

TAM_top = sum(disjoint in-scope component values)

TAM_bottom =
  sum(customer_count
      * addressable_fraction
      * annual_quantity_per_customer
      * price_per_unit)

Then apply scenario-specific serviceability and capture assumptions:

SAM_s = TAM * serviceable_fraction_s
SOM_s = SAM_s * obtainable_share_s

Use at least two genuinely different scenarios; a downside/base/upside set is usually useful. State horizon, constraints, evidence, and assumptions. SOM is not a guaranteed revenue forecast.

Run the deterministic calculator:

python3 scripts/calculate_market_sizing.py \
  assets/market_sizing_scenarios_template.json

Report both methods, midpoint-relative gap, scope differences, sensitivity, and unresolved reconciliation. Do not average incompatible methods.

6. Forecast with explicit uncertainty

Separate observed, estimated, and forecast periods. Record series ID, frequency, units, seasonal adjustment, transformations, taxonomy breaks, retrieval date, and vintage/revisions.

For each scenario:

• provide an annual rate path or driver equations;
• state demand, price, supply, regulation, competition, capacity, and timing assumptions;
• list evidence and assumption IDs;
• identify conditions that invalidate the scenario.

Do not call scenario bounds confidence or prediction intervals. Do not assign probabilities without a validated probabilistic model and diagnostics.

Run:

python3 scripts/forecast_sensitivity.py \
  assets/forecast_sensitivity_template.json

Show the range by year, endpoint sensitivity, influential assumptions, and switching values. See references/data_analysis_patterns.md.

7. Analyze customers and primary research

For survey evidence, disclose sponsor, target population, frame, probability/non-probability design, recruitment, mode/language, field dates, unweighted sample, subgroup bases, weighting, response/participation, instrument wording, precision, processing, and limitations.

For interviews/focus groups, disclose recruitment, consent, role coverage, dates/mode, guide, coding, divergent evidence, privacy controls, and limits to generalization.

Never:

• collect more personal data than necessary;
• place direct identifiers or raw recordings in report artifacts;
• use research as disguised selling or lead generation;
• misrepresent identity/purpose;
• pressure participants to reveal employer/customer secrets;
• report qualitative mention counts as market prevalence.

Follow references/methods_and_ethics.md.

8. Analyze competitors and concentration

Define product and geographic scope from the customer perspective before selecting competitors or calculating shares. Consider non-price dimensions, channels, imports, digital/multi-sided features, innovation, and dynamic change where relevant.

Use lawful public evidence and a common product edition, geography, and as-of date. Validate a complete matrix:

python3 scripts/validate_competitor_matrix.py \
  assets/competitor_feature_matrix_template.csv \
  --source-ledger assets/source_ledger_template.csv

For shares, state revenue/units/capacity/users or other metric, denominator, period, residual share, and source coverage. HHI/CRn are descriptive screens, not legal conclusions. A TAM category is not automatically a relevant antitrust market.

9. Normalize units and definitions

Before combining values:

• align geography, period, stock/flow, gross/net, unit, and denominator;
• convert currencies with an identified source and rate convention;
• align base year and nominal/real basis;
• do not force chained-dollar additivity;
• preserve taxonomy versions and document concordance uncertainty;
• record every conversion as a calculation.

Check comparison groups:

python3 scripts/check_unit_consistency.py \
  assets/consistency_check_template.csv

10. Draft and review

Lead with findings and uncertainty, not frameworks. Use optional frameworks only to organize questions; do not force scores or a fixed number of factors. Keep recommendations separate from evidence and include dependencies, trade-offs, decision thresholds, and disconfirming evidence.

Visuals are optional. If used, build them from validated local data and include scope, units, source IDs, calculation ID, observed/forecast distinction, and limitations. See references/visual_generation_guide.md.

Generate a Markdown workspace:

python3 scripts/generate_report_scaffold.py \
  assets/report_manifest_template.json ./market-report-workspace

Or use the optional LaTeX assets:

• assets/market_report_template.tex
• assets/market_research.sty
• assets/FORMATTING_GUIDE.md

Release gate

• Market boundary, taxonomy, denominator, geography, and period are explicit.
• Every factual/quantitative claim maps to exact source IDs.
• Publication/retrieval dates, revisions, method, and limitations are recorded.
• Currency/base year, nominal/real basis, stock/flow, and units are consistent.
• Top-down and bottom-up methods use disjoint coverage and are reconciled.
• TAM/SAM/SOM and forecasts are conditional scenarios with sensitivity.
• Survey/interview evidence carries method, privacy, and inference limits.
• Competitor evidence is lawful, dated, scoped, and uses unknown honestly.
• Source conflicts and revisions remain visible.
• No fabricated/unsupported paid figures, PII, trade secrets, deceptive collection, brand impersonation, or investment-advice framing appears.

Bundled resources

References

• references/report_structure_guide.md — modular report architecture.
• references/evidence_model.md — claim-source mapping and provenance.
• references/data_analysis_patterns.md — sizing, forecast, consistency, survey, and concentration methods.
• references/official_data_sources.md — current official source/API routing.
• references/methods_and_ethics.md — survey, interview, privacy, competitor, and antitrust safeguards.
• references/visual_generation_guide.md — optional evidence-led displays.
• references/sources.md — dated authoritative source ledger.

Templates and CLIs

Use the templates in assets/ as synthetic schemas, not real-world evidence. All scripts in scripts/ are standard-library, bounded, local-only tools. They reject oversized or malformed input, do not follow symlink inputs, do not overwrite outputs without explicit permission, and make no network, LLM, image, dynamic-evaluation, or pickle calls.

Source: K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills → skills/market-research-reports/SKILL.md