Create sourced marketing research with ak:marketing-research

Use ak:marketing-research to turn a market, competitor, audience, trend, or benchmark question into a dated research report. The Skill emphasizes current, multi-source evidence and actionable synthesis before planning.

Choose research when evidence is missing

Use ak:marketing-research when

• A planning decision depends on current market, audience, competitor, channel, or campaign-benchmark evidence.
• You need sources, observation dates, conflicting views, and unresolved questions preserved in one report.
• You need to distinguish what the evidence supports from what still needs customer, provider, legal, or stakeholder validation.

Choose another workflow when

• You already have approved research and need an execution decision artifact. Use ak:marketing-planning.
• You need a detailed competitor action or comparison-page draft. Use ak:competitor.
• You need to turn customer evidence into an ICP profile. Use ak:persona.

Define the research contract first

Provide the decision to support, target segments, geography, industry, timeframe, competitor boundary, KPIs to benchmark, permitted source types, and desired depth. State the output location from the runtime's Report: or ## Naming context; if it is absent, the workflow should ask for one.

Also state which data is supplied, which sources require network access, and which claims would be too sensitive or consequential to infer. A useful brief defines evidence standards and an explicit research budget within the Skill's maximum of five research tool calls.

Invoke the research question directly

/ak:marketing-research "For a launch decision, research the top three documented workflow problems of US product teams with 20-100 employees in the last 12 months. Use at most four searches, cite every claim, show conflicts, and separate evidence from assumptions"

/ak:marketing-research "For a launch decision, research the top three documented workflow problems of US product teams with 20-100 employees in the last 12 months. Use at most four searches, cite every claim, show conflicts, and separate evidence from assumptions"

$ak:marketing-research "For a launch decision, research the top three documented workflow problems of US product teams with 20-100 employees in the last 12 months. Use at most four searches, cite every claim, show conflicts, and separate evidence from assumptions"

Understand the four phases

1. Define scope. Confirm segments and personas, competitive boundaries, benchmark KPIs, geography, timeframe, depth, and decision owner.
2. Gather information systematically. Construct precise queries, use fewer than or equal to five research tool calls, prioritize authoritative and current sources, and inspect deeper source material when available.
3. Cross-check and synthesize. Compare independent sources, publication dates, consensus, conflict, maturity, constraints, risks, and applicability to the stated market.
4. Generate the report. Save a timestamped Markdown artifact to the supplied report path with methodology, findings, comparison where relevant, recommendations, linked resources, next steps, and unresolved questions.

The source suggests parallel calls when a runtime supports them, but the five-call ceiling remains total and a smaller user-specified limit wins.

Keep research separate from action

Web research sends queries to external services and may retrieve untrusted content. Do not submit secrets, private customer data, or restricted documents. The Skill creates research; it does not authorize outreach, surveys, tracking, account changes, purchases, paid data access, campaign execution, or publication.

Verify the report and provenance

A decision-ready report should provide:

• Research question, scope, search budget, methodology, date, and owner.
• Search terms and linked sources with publication or observation dates.
• Material claims mapped to evidence, with primary sources preferred where possible.
• Conflicts, limitations, missing populations, and assumptions shown separately.
• Recommendations tied to findings and framed as options, not guaranteed performance, revenue, market size, or conversion.
• Exact report path, next validation steps, and unresolved questions.

Troubleshoot and know the limits

The bundled outline is partly technology-oriented even though the Skill's declared scope is marketing research. It defines no paid-data provider, survey method, sample threshold, or statistical confidence rule. “Last 12 months” is a preference, not proof of quality; historical evidence may still be necessary. Continue with ak:marketing-planning only after the research is reviewed.