What the research phase produces

One phase, five sections

Research is one phase that runs start to finish on its own and leaves behind a single file, split into five sections in a fixed order: brand, product, market, competitors, and avatar. There is no list of research types to choose between. You get these five, every time, and every creative you make later reads from them.

You do not kick it off by hand. Creating a project starts the bootstrap, and research is the first wave it runs, so by the time you open the workspace the five sections are usually already filling in. Think of it as the shared case file a whole team works from: gathered once, up front, so nobody re-investigates the same brand for every new job.

What each section is for

Brand and product describe what you are and what you sell. Market and competitors describe the space you are selling into. The avatar section is the deepest of the five, and it is where audience and customer insight lives. Later lessons take each one in turn.

What research is, and is not

Being precise about the edges saves you time. Research ships exactly these five sections. There is no separate trend research, no standalone customer research, and no creative-ad research hiding inside this phase.

Pain points and objections are not research either. They are produced one layer later, in Creative Strategy, out of the avatar and messaging work. If you are after objection maps or pain-point framing, that is the next chapter.

This matters in practice. A weak creative is almost always missing project context, not a missing research type. The fix is to run or re-run the five sections, not to go looking for a research button that was never built.