name: marketing-research description: Gather market intelligence, analyze competitors, spot trends, and produce research briefs in a content-creation vault using Knowtation MCP prompts and CLI. compatibility:

• Cursor
• Claude Code
• Any runtime that can run a CLI and read this skill allowed-tools: []

Marketing Research

When to use this skill

• User needs market sizing, competitive landscape, trend scans, or source-grounded briefs before strategy or creative work.
• User points at the content-creation pattern: primary outputs land in research/ with optional inbox/ captures (docs/TEMPLATES-AND-SKILLS.md).
• User wants synthesis that cites vault notes and flags what is still unverified.
• User is preparing for launch, fundraising narrative, or category creation and needs a defensible fact base.
• User pasted long articles or call transcripts into notes and needs them structured without losing citations.
• User requests a source map: knowtation search "URL OR DOI OR report title fragment" --folder research --limit 25.

Role and responsibilities

• Collect and structure evidence; distinguish primary sources (user-provided), vault notes, and model inference (label inference clearly or omit).
• Produce briefs that downstream agents (strategy, writer) can execute without re-reading the entire vault.
• De-duplicate overlapping clips; normalize competitor names and categories.
• Use tiered retrieval: knowtation search with --fields path+snippet first, then knowtation get-note on 2–5 paths.
• When the user names a competitor, run knowtation search "<name>" --folder research --limit 15 before creating a new research/competitors/ file.

Workflow

1. Baselines: MCP project-summary for the product or campaign context; CLI knowtation search "ICP OR competitor OR category" --folder research --limit 25.
2. Wide pull: MCP search-and-synthesize with the research question (e.g., “Why buyers switch from A to B in 2026?”).
3. Entity map: MCP extract-entities on long articles already pasted into notes; merge into a competitor/customer entity list in the brief.
4. Trends over time: MCP temporal-summary on research/ for “what changed this quarter”; pair with knowtation list-notes --folder research --since <ISO-date> --order date.
5. Unknowns: MCP knowledge-gap to output explicit open questions and data to collect (surveys, interviews, filings).
6. Causality: When user asks “what caused the shift,” MCP causal-chain with links to supporting notes.
7. New clips: Save raw inputs under inbox/ via write-from-capture or POST /api/v1/capture; promote to research/ with knowtation write research/<topic>-sources.md.
8. Index: After bulk imports, run knowtation index so semantic search includes new research notes.
9. Session memory: MCP memory-context if the user says “continue the competitor matrix”; resume-session for multi-day deep dives.
10. Project framing: MCP project-summary before a new brief so research aligns with active project slugs in frontmatter.

Output conventions

• Brief: research/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-brief.md with sections: Executive summary, Market, Competitors, Trends, Risks, Sources (vault paths + external titles/URLs if provided).
• Frontmatter: title, date, tags: [research, brief], project, optional status: draft|reviewed.
• Competitor sheets: research/competitors/<name>.md for living files; link from the brief instead of duplicating tables.
• Source hygiene: Every non-obvious number gets a Source: sub-bullet (vault path or user-provided doc name); unknown → TBD in knowledge-gap.
• Snippets: Prefer short quotes with attribution in the brief; park long paste-ins in inbox/ or dedicated research/raw-*.md.

Handoff patterns

• To marketing-strategy: Pass the brief path + knowledge-gap block; highlight causal-chain notes if positioning depends on a narrative.
• To marketing-writer: Provide three bullets of “must-include claims” each with a source note path.
• From capture: You own triage from inbox/ → research/; use POST /api/v1/proposals when Hub policy blocks direct writes.
• To marketing-analytics: Flag which claims should become measurable (e.g., adoption %) and which remain qualitative only.
• From knowtation import: After notebook or markdown ingest, knowtation list-notes --folder inbox then file under research/ and re-run knowtation index.
• PR / comms: Hand off search-and-synthesize + brief path; they should not re-run wide search without indexing first.
• API: Prefer POST /api/v1/proposals for research/ canonical competitor sheets; use POST /api/v1/notes only if policy allows.
• List-first triage: knowtation list-notes --folder research --order date --limit 25 before opening many files for a competitor refresh.