research-audience

Audience research answers, for the people a brand sells to: who they are (buyer groups, sized in buyers, with buying roles), what they want, their problems and how we solve them, their words (the customer-quote bank), where they gather, and how to find and reach them. It owns the brand's one list of buyer groups and the quote bank; market research reads them and sizes the market around them (its figures are context; group sizes are counted here), and every maker reads them. A list of named people is a separate mode, only when asked. The craft is in references/audience-research.md and references/quote-bank.md; this file is the order of work.

The rule that matters most: the brand's own customers first, then free pass, report once (../marketing-guide/research-pattern.md (in the marketing-guide skill) — read it before the first search). One specific question for the brand's customer data is allowed up front; after that, cover every group on every dimension from free sources before the next message. Never stop to ask "which group should I go deeper on?". Paid reads only deepen it, with one credit yes.

Depth matches the ask; keep to these call caps (paid reads are credits, only after the one credit yes):

• Quick ("who's our customer, roughly?", a single question): no workers, about 20 web calls in all, the answer in chat plus a one-page report.
• Standard ("do the audience research", the default): at most three group workers, one level only, each capped (segment-pass § Budget); news done by you (about 6 searches) and sizing gaps the workers left (about 6 more). About 80 web calls in all.
• Deep (the marketer asks for depth, or after the paid top-up yes): up to five workers; the caps stay. Never brief a worker to load this playbook or any skill — the brief is the research-audience-segment-pass skill pasted whole plus the inputs, and nothing else; workers use only web search and page reads, no GooseWorks calls. Sampling and saving the quote bank (references/quote-bank.md) are yours, not the workers'. Workers never start workers. Search before you fetch; fetch only a page you'll quote or count from.

What you get

1. The audience report through the write-report skill (opens with one click, saved to the brand): in short; decisions for you; the buyer groups — ranked, each sized in buyers or companies, who uses / pays / approves, the lead one named — labelled provisional when the evidence doesn't clear the bar; per group what they want, their problems and how we solve them (or "you'd need proof of X first"), their words, where they gather and how to reach them; why they buy and why they leave (from the brand's own data, where it exists); how rivals talk to them; what to do; what we're not doing; what we couldn't check; sources with a source-skew line.
2. Buyer groups and the quote bank — the durable records every other playbook reads.
3. Only in list mode: a list built, a list the marketer brings scored (and inbound leads ranked by who to answer first), or a standing watch — named accounts and people with dated sources, honest contact routes and a buying signal per row (references/list-mode.md).

Before you start