Getting ready to buy a $3,000 research report? Read this first

If your company is facing a multi-million dollar tech acquisition, deployment or marketing decision, those pricey analyst reports have the promise of a multiple return on investment.

While that ROI is commonplace, there are some things about how companies market these reports to you that you might want to know. 

The companies that prepare these reports (and to be fair, I've done a few on contract) have a pricing model that zealously guards the crown jewels. In the case of these reports, the crown jewels are the "why" behind the stats.

Such reports are subscriber-only, but you have to give your potential customers a taste. Sometimes, that taste is in the form of an executive summary available for free to existing customers. Sometimes this summary is offered to prospective customers who complete a free registration process replete with data about their enterprises, their technology use, and themselves.

For the general public, the approach is to hit a couple of bullet items from the report and place them in a press release.

So the marketing chain for these reports is: press release sparks inquiries; inquiring minds register for free on the report or report-distributor site; inquiring minds taste more morsels from the executive summary,and then they dig in deep. Real deep.