You’re completely off the mark here. I’ve worked at a Big4 company before on reports like this. These reports aren’t paid for by other companies at all. They’re internally funded and done by the internal research teams. The motivations behind them are numerous: marketing, having artifacts to help rank at the top of stuff like Gartner reports, and even because believe it or not the people that work there sometimes genuinely enjoy researching and publishing reports. Reports like this are the consulting company equivalent of a tech company’s engineering blog bragging about their new scalable infrastructure or whatever.
If you see a report published by a company that says “PwC did research for us”, then yes, it has likely been influenced by that company. But a report like this that is entirely PwC branded is not that.
If you see a report published by a company that says “PwC did research for us”, then yes, it has likely been influenced by that company. But a report like this that is entirely PwC branded is not that.