Question

Marketing Research is an important aspect of developing a marketing strategy. How would you go about collecting data, what data is important, where would you begin.

Answer 1

Understanding the market by researching it would be useful in developing a market strategy to establish and grow to attain profits. The type of information you want to collect on your customers, market or competitors will influence the research methods you select. There are different ways to gather information (from primary or secondary sources).

Primary research

Primary research collects original information directly based on your purpose, rather than being gathered from published sources. Primary research gives you control over the type of questions you query and information you collect. Primary research results can be very esteemed, they can also be much more time-consuming and costly to gather than secondary research. They include;

• surveys
• direct observations
• interviews and focus groups

Secondary research

Secondary research gathers existing information through existing sources. Secondary research allows you to make the most of existing information about market. It is quicker to analyze than primary data because someone else may have already started analyzing it, but sometimes one should be careful to select the date because it may be irrelevant. The examples include:

• internet information
• existing market research results
• existing data from your customer database
• information from agencies such as industry bodies, government agencies, libraries.