Syndicated research: when to buy the report and when to commission

Syndicated research is a study a research firm designs, pays for and runs on its own, then sells to many buyers. Buy syndicated research when your question is about the market as a whole, and commission custom research (or run your own interviews) when the question is about a segment the report barely covers or a change that happened after it was written.

The price gap is large. A single US industry report from IBISWorld lists at $2,850, while one full-service research firm puts the average custom B2B study at $30,000 to $50,000. So the real decision is which of your questions a report can answer, and what the cheapest way is to cover the ones it cannot.

Syndicated means you share the study, and the firm owns it

Escalent, a firm that runs syndicated studies, defines the term as research independently conducted, published and sold by a market research firm. The firm picks the subject and scope, and many clients buy the same results.

Custom research works the other way round. You pay for the whole study, you decide what it asks and whom, and the results are yours. Drive Research, which sells custom studies, lists the tradeoffs from its side:

Syndicated reports are a kind of secondary market research: data someone else collected for their own purpose. The difference from free government tables is that a publisher has already done the analysis and is charging you for it.

Off-the-shelf reports cost hundreds to a few thousand dollars

Many publishers quote prices only through a sales conversation. These two post list prices on their own pages.

By our calculation, a year of Statista Starter comes to $2,388 and a year of Personal to $7,788. Statista says both accounts require an annual contract and renew at the regular list price. IBISWorld says memberships discount the per-report price and are quoted through sales. For expert-call and survey prices next to these, see what market research costs.

Custom work starts far higher. Drive Research's own averages are $15,000 to $30,000 for a full-service consumer study, $30,000 to $50,000 for full-service B2B, and six to eight weeks for a full-service project. These are one firm's figures, not an industry survey. On those numbers, the $2,850 report costs roughly a tenth of the cheapest full-service B2B study, by our calculation.

Reports are good at size, growth and the big players

A syndicated industry report typically answers the questions that many buyers share: how big the industry is, how fast it is growing, who the largest companies are and which outside forces push on it. Those are the same questions every investor deck and planning memo asks, which is why a publisher can sell the answer many times.

Buy the report when:

• You need a defensible market size for a board deck and do not want to build it from Census tables yourself.
• You are entering an industry you know nothing about and need the vocabulary and the major companies in an afternoon.
• Someone you report to expects a named source for the headline numbers.

Skip it when free data already answers the question. The secondary research guide lists the public sources worth checking first.

Reports get thin in narrow B2B segments and recent shifts

Syndicated research is written for the widest set of buyers who will pay for it. That has two consequences for you.

Narrow segments get a paragraph, at most. A report on an industry averages across everyone in it. If you sell to a sliver of that industry (the 40-person regional firms, the buyers who use one specific system), the report usually cannot split them out. Drive Research names this directly: syndicated data is less useful for very niche topics, and you have no control over the questions asked or how results are broken down.

Recent changes lag. IBISWorld says it updates its reports one to four times a year, depending on how much each market has changed. That is a sensible pace for market size. It is slow for a regulation that took effect last month or a competitor's price change in the spring. (A report is a photograph, and your market did not stand still for it.)

The questions that fall into these gaps are usually the ones that decide what you build or sell: how buyers in your segment do the work today, who approves a purchase, what they compared you against, and what changed in the last six months.

A made-up example: the report that stopped at "pet care"

Here is a made-up example. Dana runs product at a company that sells scheduling software to mobile dog groomers, the ones who drive a van to your driveway. She has a board meeting in three weeks and two questions: how big is the market, and should the company add route planning next quarter?

She buys a syndicated report on pet grooming services. It gives her a market size, a growth rate and the largest chains. That covers the first question, and she has it the same afternoon.

The report says almost nothing about mobile groomers specifically, and nothing about how they plan routes. It was last updated before a fuel price jump that her customers keep mentioning. The second question is still open, and it is the one that decides the roadmap.

A custom study would answer it, at a price and a timeline built for bigger questions than "would 30 van operators pay for routing?" Dana does something smaller: she talks to eight mobile groomers who are not her customers and two people who sell vans or equipment to many of them. Ten conversations in two weeks tell her whether routing is a real problem and roughly what it is worth. (One groomer, it turns out, plans her day around which clients have shade.)

Fill the gaps with conversations before you commission a study

Here is how to split the work:

1. Write down every question behind the decision. Mark each one "market" (size, growth, major companies) or "segment" (how a specific kind of buyer behaves, decides or has changed recently).
2. Answer the market questions from a report. Check free sources first; buy the report when you need a named source or the analysis would take you days.
3. Answer the segment questions with interviews. Plan six to ten conversations with people inside the segment, enough to see whether a question deserves a bigger study. Expert interviews cover how to run them.
4. Commission custom research only for what is left. That means a representative number you must defend, a formal method, fieldwork in several countries, or a result that has to come from an independent firm. How to choose a market research firm covers the brief.

The tradeoff: interviews will not give you a statistically representative percentage. They tell you why and how, and whether the question is worth paying $30,000 to measure.

Your next step

List the questions your next decision depends on and mark which ones a report could answer. For the rest, find six people who work inside the segment and ask them.

Instant Expert can find people matching a description such as "owners of mobile dog grooming businesses with one to three vans." You review who it finds, it sends your invitations, and you pay only when someone books a call or answers. Your offer is what each person receives, and Instant Expert's fee is added on top. The directory pages for consumer insights experts and strategy consultants show the kinds of people you can reach.