The Dog Blog

How To Write A Research Brief – The Overview

One of the more common documents you come across in market research is the research brief – the written communication passed from research buyer to research supplier that provides an outline of the market research project that needs to be done. Such written briefs can be formal or casual in tone, full paragraphs or bullet points, less than a page long or near novella size – such is their variability. However, these research briefs all share the same components that help the market research agency develop the right approach to meet the client’s need.

These components are:

• The Background: the background to the client’s company and their current research need(s).
• The Objectives: the key areas that the market research needs to answer.
• Specific Project Information: this can include things such as the target audience(s) to consider, stakeholders to involve / be aware of, an overview of the product / concept, current market conditions, competitor actions, etc. Basically, this section fleshes out the nature of the research project and includes details that may impact on how the research is run.
• The Timing: the key dates and deadlines (if any) for the research project.
• The Budget: how much the client is looking to spend on the project.

In the weeks ahead we’ll go into those areas of the research brief in a bit more depth, but if a research brief contains the above sections it will certainly provide a reasonable starting point for an agency to build a proposal on the back of.

(There are certainly cases where the research brief is purely verbal from buyer to supplier. We certainly have experienced these kind of briefs and know that they contain exactly the same components as a written brief.)