What makes a good research brief?

This is a topic that we ponder upon frequently - we see many research briefs whether they are for assignments or real-life projects. They all have one thing in common, none of them are a perfect set of instructions that could be passed to an agency or consultant without consultation. Perhaps they should be, but the reality is that the brief is the start of a conversation and a debate about the most appropriate methods; a chance to untangle the complexities of the sampling approach; and even the merits of how much to spend. In fact, we'd go as far to say that if your agency or consultant prepares your proposal without asking you any questions or challenging you on your brief, then they are not the right supplier for the job. Don't forget, the brief forms a contract between two parties and if anything goes awry, the document itself, the responding proposal, emails and meeting notes will be scrutinised to see who pays for any mistakes or misunderstandings! And that can be an expensive process.

So firstly, a good research brief needs to have a clear structure giving a good indication of why you need the research and a definition of the research problem. It's important to give some background information on the organisation itself - and it's amazing how many businesspeople we meet who can't explain in plain English what they do for a living! Financial services, hold your heads in shame!

Next, you must include research objectives - this is the most important part. Make them SMART if you can and it's useful to consider the research questions you want to ask under those objectives, although your research provider will also contribute here. This is the section that needs most work and is often the one that seems to be poorly thought through in our experience - don't forget, this sets the scope of your project!

Give useful guidance such as previous methods that haven't worked with the target audience, a definition of the target audience(s), any access you can provide such as a customer database or through social media, any constraints to the project, and so on...

Finally, give an indication of the timeline but make it realistic - it's unlikely you can appoint an agency and get focus groups, an on-line survey and the analysis done in 3 weeks...

Consider your budget... some clients don't like to say what they have in the pot and others like to be upfront. A colleague once put a brief out to pitch with no budget attached and had proposals costing £50,00 to £150,000! We tend to work with smaller companies and budgets and we'd rather a client said our ceiling is £x rather than us pitch the best solution which is out of their reach - we can always rejig a solution by reducing the sample, changing the methodology or interview length to get the client the answers they need.

The last point to make is a plea! Only issue a brief if there is a real research project that is likely to go ahead. Probably 70% of the briefs we pitch for don't even happen because of the client's internal issues... we all have to think about our time and resources so ask for a guestimate rather than issue a full-blown brief until you have the go-ahead.

If you'd like to read more about creating a good structure for a research brief, we highly recommend Yvonne McGivern's book on The Practice of Market Research (click on the image below) which we use when delivering the MRS Advanced Certificate at The Marketers Forum. The next course starts after Easter 2014.