Market research, as a sub-set aspect of marketing activities, can be divided into the following parts:
Primary research (also known as
field research), which involves the conduction and compilation of research for
a specific purpose.
Secondary research (also referred
to as desk research), initially conducted for one purpose, but often used to
support another purpose or end goal.
By these definitions, an example
of primary research would be market research conducted into health foods, which
is used solely to ascertain the needs/wants of the target market for health
foods. Secondary research in this case would be research pertaining to health
foods, but used by a firm wishing to develop an unrelated product.
Primary research is often
expensive to prepare, collect and interpret from data to information.
Nevertheless, while secondary research is relatively inexpensive, it often can
become outdated and outmoded, given that it is used for a purpose other than
the one for which it was intended. Primary research can also be broken down
into quantitative research and qualitative research, which, as the terms
suggest, pertain to numerical and non-numerical research methods and
techniques, respectively. The appropriateness of each mode of research depends
on whether data can be quantified (quantitative research), or whether
subjective, non-numeric or abstract concepts are required to be studied
(qualitative research).
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