Researcher

Your strategic intelligence gatherer - Deep market analysis, competitor insights, and trend identification

What This Agent Does

You’re making marketing decisions based on gut feel instead of data. Your competitor just launched a new feature and you’re caught off guard. You don’t know what messaging resonates in your market or what trends are emerging. You’re fighting blind.

The Problem: Effective marketing requires deep market understanding, but most teams don’t have time for thorough research. They skip competitive analysis, miss emerging trends, and create campaigns without understanding what’s already working in their market.

The Solution: The Researcher is your expert market intelligence specialist who gathers, analyzes, and synthesizes information across multiple sources. This agent investigates market trends and shifts, analyzes competitor strategies and positioning, researches customer pain points and desires, identifies content opportunities and gaps, studies successful campaign patterns, and discovers authoritative sources and best practices.

This agent follows systematic research methodologies used by top strategy consulting firms, combining query fan-out techniques with multi-source validation to deliver reliable insights.

Quick Start

Get market insights in 30 seconds:

# Research your market landscape
/ask "Research the [your industry] market and identify key trends for 2025"

# The agent analyzes multiple sources and synthesizes findings

Capabilities

Market Trend Analysis

Understand where your market is heading before your competitors do. The agent identifies emerging trends across technology, customer behavior, and industry practices, analyzes adoption patterns and growth trajectories, researches regulatory changes affecting your market, studies macro trends impacting your industry, and provides strategic implications for your marketing.

Example: The agent discovers that 67% of your target market is now researching solutions on LinkedIn vs. Google (up from 42% last year), suggesting a shift in content distribution strategy.

Competitive Intelligence

Know exactly what your competitors are doing and why it’s working. The agent analyzes competitor websites, content, and messaging, researches their product positioning and pricing strategies, studies their marketing channels and campaigns, identifies their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, and extracts lessons from their wins and losses.

Customer Research

Understand your audience better than they understand themselves. The agent researches pain points mentioned in reviews and forums, analyzes customer language and terminology usage, studies buyer journey patterns and touchpoints, identifies objections and concerns by segment, and discovers what motivates purchasing decisions.

Content Opportunity Discovery

Find exactly what content to create next. The agent identifies content gaps in your market coverage, researches high-performing content themes and formats, analyzes search demand for topics in your space, studies viral content patterns in your industry, and recommends specific content opportunities with rationale.

Technology and Tool Research

Evaluate marketing technologies and platforms. The agent researches tools for specific marketing functions, compares features, pricing, and integration capabilities, analyzes user reviews and satisfaction scores, identifies best practices for implementation, and recommends tools based on your specific needs.

Best Practice Synthesis

Learn from the best in your field. The agent identifies authoritative sources and thought leaders, synthesizes best practices from multiple sources, distinguishes proven strategies from experimental ones, cross-references advice for accuracy and relevance, and provides actionable recommendations grounded in evidence.

When to Use

Use the Researcher when you need to:

  • Understand market trends before making strategic decisions
  • Analyze what competitors are doing and identify opportunities
  • Research customer pain points and language for messaging
  • Discover content opportunities in your market
  • Evaluate marketing tools and technologies
  • Gather best practices for specific marketing tactics

Example Workflows

Workflow 1: Competitive Analysis

Deep-dive into competitor strategies:

# Step 1: Identify competitors
/scout "Who are the top 5 competitors in [your market]?"

# Step 2: Analyze their strategies
/ask "Research [competitor names] and analyze their marketing strategies"

# The agent will investigate:
# - Website positioning and messaging
# - Content strategy and topics
# - SEO and paid search approach
# - Social media presence and engagement
# - Product positioning and pricing
# - Customer acquisition channels
# - Strengths and weaknesses

# Step 3: Get strategic recommendations
# Agent synthesizes findings into actionable insights

Output: Comprehensive competitive intelligence report with strategic implications.

Workflow 2: Market Trend Research

Identify emerging opportunities:

# Research market trends
/ask "Research emerging trends in [your industry] for the next 12 months"

# The agent explores:
# - Industry publications and reports
# - Technology adoption patterns
# - Customer behavior shifts
# - Regulatory changes
# - Macro economic factors
# - Expert predictions and analysis

# Delivers trend report with strategic recommendations

Output: Market trend analysis with implications for your marketing strategy.

Workflow 3: Content Gap Analysis

Find content opportunities:

# Identify content gaps
/ask "What content topics are our competitors covering that we're missing?"

# The agent analyzes:
# - Competitor content catalogs
# - Search demand for topics
# - Content performance indicators
# - Coverage gaps in your content
# - High-opportunity topics

# Recommends prioritized content opportunities

Output: Content gap analysis with prioritized recommendations.

Workflow 4: Customer Research

Understand your audience deeply:

# Research customer insights
/ask "Research pain points and language used by [your target audience]"

# The agent investigates:
# - Review sites and G2/Capterra feedback
# - Reddit, Quora, and forum discussions
# - Social media conversations
# - Support ticket themes
# - Sales call transcripts (if available)

# Synthesizes common themes and language patterns

Output: Customer insight report with verbatim quotes and themes.

Best Practices

  1. Start With Questions: Before researching, define clear questions you need answered. This focuses the agent on relevant information.

  2. Cross-Reference Sources: The agent validates information across multiple sources. Trust insights that appear consistently, be skeptical of single-source claims.

  3. Look for Patterns: Individual data points are less valuable than patterns. The agent identifies trends across multiple sources for reliable insights.

  4. Separate Signal from Noise: Not all research is equally valuable. Focus on insights that are actionable and relevant to your specific situation.

  5. Research Continuously: Markets change quickly. Schedule regular research sprints (monthly or quarterly) to stay current on trends and competitors.

  6. Document Everything: The agent creates detailed reports. Keep these in your knowledge base to build institutional memory.

Skills Integration

The Researcher actively uses:

  • research - Systematic technical solution research and planning
  • docs-seeker - Finding relevant documentation efficiently
  • document-skills - Analyzing documents and extracting insights

These skills are automatically activated based on research needs.

Output Reports

The agent creates comprehensive research reports at:

  • Reports: reports/research/researcher-{date}-{topic-slug}.md

Reports follow concise formatting with key findings, evidence, and unresolved questions clearly documented.

  • /scout - Find relevant files and context
  • /ask - Query the agent for research
  • /plan - Create comprehensive research plans