21st Century Market Research: Reporting and Delivery

The era of the 102-page PowerPoint report (plus appendix) is over.

Or is it?

Like many future-related questions, the answer is both yes and no.

The Past

Why did PowerPoint (or Google Slides, for some) become the norm in the first place? Because "a picture is worth a thousand words" and using charts and graphs is a convenient way to communicate aggregated numeric information.

Even those who, like me, prefer memos to PowerPoint understand that long blocks of text can be intimidating. So, like many a researcher I have spent my career creating PowerPoint reports that summarize the objectives, methodology, findings and recommendations of study after study.

However, I saw the limits of this type of written report early in my career.

Reports are static.

Once delivered, they are read by (at most) a few people once or twice and then filed away. Most clients, particularly senior decision makers, read little beyond the executive summary.

Over the years, I’ve found that presentations and the interactive discussions they spark are what tend to bring insights to life.

But presentations aren't always possible or desired by clients and when there is no discussion of the results, delivery is often as simple as sending a deck via email, just as we did back in the 1990's.

This is troubling for our industry. The world around us has changed drastically since the 90s and we need to change with it.

It Starts with Clients

To state the obvious: all research begins with clients.

If you are on the vendor side, you are delivering insights to the clients who commissioned the research. If you are on the client side, you are delivering insights to the stakeholders who requested the information.

Both groups, clients and internal stakeholders, have one thing in common: they want to learn something.

So, it's worth stepping back and asking ourselves how people tend to learn things in 2025. Reading articles and reports is one way, but not the only way.

I don't think I'm alone in that when I'm trying to learn about a topic, in addition to reading relevant books or articles, I also seek out podcasts and video content on YouTube.

These are both effective in that they engage different senses and allow me to take in the content whenever I want. They also take less time, and it is easy to listen or watch multiple times, which can be helpful for letting new information sink in via repeat exposure.

The Future

Here is my question for the research community: why don't we deliver insights in ways that align with how we collectively learn things in the modern world?

In the past, there were relatively high technical barriers to creating audio and video content, but these have been dramatically lowered, and AI will lower them still further.

For example, once you have created a detailed report, you could upload slides to AI-driven podcast and video generation apps (assuming you have appropriate privacy agreements, etc.) and with solid training and instruction produce versions of the results via these mediums.

The detailed report would serve multiple purposes, as both a source of truth for what the data says, as well as an input to these additional deliverables.

Horses for Courses

Am I suggesting that we triple our delivery efforts and create three versions of what is essentially the same thing? No and no.

I'm suggesting that we would spend the same amount of time on analysis and reporting but, with the assistance of technology, we would be able to create more and different deliverables that serve different purposes:

• Written report to provide in-depth analysis and serve as the basis for other outputs

  
  

• Podcast to enable more casual engagement with the insights and spark unexpected or "out of the box" ideas

  
  

• Video to communicate the "what" and "how" related to implementing recommendations

  
  

This multi-modal approach would provide a more well-rounded and, in my view, effective, way of delivering insights to clients.

The Fourth Method

Having said all that, all of the methods I have discussed so far are still passive.

The reader/listener/watcher is receiving information, but not able to generate the productive back and forth that comes from discussing results and implications, or to ask new questions sparked that occur to them. Here again, we are entering an age when dynamic interaction with large data sets via natural language interfaces will be able to address this.

Imagine an interactive data asset that clients could query like a person. One that integrates the current study with other data streams, past and present, to provide contextualized insights in real time. It would function like a member of the team who has command of all the relevant information on a topic and is available to answer questions as needed. All day, every day.

None of this is to suggest that there will be no more "human" presentations or discussions about the findings. In fact, I suspect the opposite will be true. As we make the insights more relevant and useful, and make interacting with them easier and more valuable, we will likely raise our profile and stature in the eyes of clients and stakeholders.

It All Comes Back to Helping Clients Learn

To sum up: the process of delivering insights and value to clients is likely to begin with creating a "traditional" report, which can then be used as an input to create other media that help clients access different modes of learning, and end with adding findings to an evolving strategic data asset that supports querying of both discrete and cross-pollinated data sets.

This is the next stage for insights analysis, but achieving it will require investment in tools, training and product development and management.

As always, there is no free lunch. But there is the opportunity to rethink how we deliver value to clients.