What is the Modern Research Experience?
With modern business professionals in mind, we are revamping our Industry Reports to deliver information in a more streamlined fashion that makes it quick and easy to bring our industry insights into your world.
The first phase of these improvements involves making our writing style and format more intuitive. Over the course of 2023, additional improvements to our charts and data visuals, table of contents, navigation and export options will round out this modern experience.
This brochure demonstrates the full scope of the changes and the value they bring.
Writing style and format changes
We began applying a new writing style and format to our reports at the end of 2022. These changes to the writing style and formatting are aimed at creating more scannable industry insights through the following adjustments:
Concise and approachable writing style
We define writing style as the voice, personality and overall tone applied to written text. Our writing style is shifting to better suit a business audience, becoming leaner and more direct to make our industry analysis easier to digest.
Improved formatting
List-style analysis appears in nearly every chapter, taking the place of paragraphs. This new format is designed to facilitate the process of using our insights in your own reports and presentations.
Actionable subheadings
Subheadings are now a staple in most sections. Our analysts highlight the key factors or trends discussed in each section and write headline-style subheadings that help you quickly gauge what’s happening in an industry and navigate to the information you’re most interested in reading.
Convenient data call outs
Key quantitative data points are moving to the top of most sections. When looking for exact figures, you don't need to scan through paragraphs – look for data quickly and easily at the start of the section.
Our Industry Report collection is currently being updated to reflect this new style and format over the first half of 2023, with new reports being published each week. We expect about 90% of the collection to be updated by the end of June 2023.
Table of contents changes
Our Modern Industry Research Experience will provide the most straightforward path to industry information by introducing new navigation and content changes toward the end of 2023. Key features include:
Centralized data
New chapter organization groups similar insights together for your convenience.
For example, the new Performance chapter covers Current Performance, Volatility, Outlook and Life Cycle to give you a full view of the industry’s performance. Another example is the new External Environment chapter, which combines Key External Drivers, Regulation and Policy and Assistance.
Our goal is to speed up your research process by helping you navigate industry dynamics in a logical, easy to understand format.
A strong foundation
Our early chapters are changing to help ground you in the industry. The new About chapter provides a quick and digestible overview of the industry's position relative to its overall sector. Through a simpler layout, the About chapter offers relevant industry coding, connections to related industries and other details that are critical to your understanding of the industry so you can be confident that you're in the right place.
The new At a Glance chapter can stand alone as a high-level overview, or function as your starting point for deeper research. We're including hyperlinks and other features that allow you to move seamlessly from the At a Glance view into specific sections of the report.
Shorter time to value
Key Takeaways and data Insights are being added at the top of every chapter to make it easier for you to find important and impactful information quickly. When you have limited time to research an unfamiliar industry, our concise overview of key data and information can help.
Why is IBISWorld modernizing?
Enhancements to our report collection are in direct response to client feedback, client interviews and focus group research on the experience of using the IBISWorld database.
Through this feedback, we’ve identified what works well for most clients, and which areas pose challenges. To address challenges and optimize our research collections, we’ve created a roadmap of key changes that will make for a more streamlined experience.
The writing style and format changes are in progress and are designed to reduce the time and effort you spend finding and analyzing our industry insights. The table of contents changes are coming soon and will make navigating IBISWorld's information a breeze.
How will report changes impact me?
Writing style changes
Improvements to our writing style are simply designed to save you time and effort by making the reports more scannable and easier to digest. List-style analysis is the new approach in nearly every section that previously contained paragraphs, with the exception of the Executive Summary in the About chapter. Though list-style analysis is not used in this section, you’ll still encounter more concise analysis that gets to the point quickly.
Table of contents changes
When the Modern Industry Research Experience launches, our table of contents will appear leaner due to better organization. The following sections are being consolidated to deliver you insights in the most efficient way:
Recent Developments – Instead of living on the About page, Recent Developments are folded into Key Takeaways and Insights for the relevant chapter.
Demand Determinants – We're retiring written analysis for this section and covering sources of demand in the Key External Drivers section instead.
Industry Globalization – We're trading written analysis in this section for intuitive data visuals that offer more granular insights. You can turn to the International Trade section and explore Imports and Exports to understand the level of globalization.
Basis of Competition – We’re retiring written analysis in this section; instead, the newly-titled Competitive Forces chapter covers the level of internal competition, and a new section on Substitutes discusses external competition for industry products or services.
Glossary – Glossary terms are moving to a centralized location on the website. A more comprehensive list of terms will be here before you know it.
You can look for this new table of contents in late 2023, along with any new chapters or information mentioned above.
For additional questions regarding the Modern Industry Research Experience and any of the updates involved, please contact your Client Relationship Manager. If you don’t have an IBISWorld account, please contact us to learn more about our membership options.