| Question | Answer |
| Industry and professional associations | Most industries have dedicated media and organizations, which publish online or offline news, magazines, newsletters, and journals and collect data about their industry or profession. |
| Secondary data limitations | Information may be dated
May not directly address what you need to know |
| Primary data benefit | Information is directly related to what you want to know |
| Primary data limitations | Can be costly or time-consuming to collect
Requires expertise in data collection |
| Commercial marketing research companies | Syndicated research of consumer data for purchase as well as database information on consumer purchases and behavior. |
| Internet searches | May provide useful insights into what data has already been collected. |
| Group think | Psychological phenomenon in which individual members of a group accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group position (even when it conflicts with their own beliefs or judgment) |
| Government agency, nonprofit, and NGO data | Agencies freely publish economic data, demographic data, trade statistics, and regulatory information. |
| social listening | Monitoring conversations on social media or soliciting input from a social media community |
| Secondary research | uses secondary data, or source information that has previously been collected either inside or outside the organization. Internal data and some external data are freely available or have only a nominal |
| Closed-ended questions (structured questions) | Questions where a researcher provides a set of options from which to choose a response, also called structured questions |
| Database marketing organizations | sometimes called customer insights services providers, collect massive amounts of information about consumers by linking financial and credit data to tracking data about online and offline purchases and other behaviors |
| in-depth interviews | Conversations with an individual the marketer wants to understand better |
| Marketing Research | is the process of systematic gathering, recording, and analyzing data about customers, competitors, and the market. |
| Behavioral observations | Watching customers and noncustomers engage with a product |
| Primary research | involves data collection that is tailored to the specific challenge or problem you are trying to address. There are many ways to conduct primary research. |
| qualitative primary research | explores ideas, perceptions, and behaviors in depth with a relatively small number of research participants. It aims to answer questions with more complex, open-ended responses. |
| quantitative primary research | collects information that can be easily counted, tabulated, and statistically analyzed. |
| primary data | Data collection specifically tailored to the problem you are trying to address |
| experimental research | Testing the effect of varying a factor or a set of factors in a marketing artifact |
| internal data | A company’s internal data, such as sales and marketing records, customer account information, product purchasing, and usage data are typical secondary data sources. |
| survey research | Asking individual consumers to provide responses on a questionnaire |
| A/B testing | A marketing experiment where two variants of a campaign are tested to see which one is most effective |
| storing content | protect participants’ privacy, measures in place to store collected data, notify participants if data breach |
| Secondary data benefit | Typically lower cost and less time to collect
Data already exists |
| Open ended questions (Unstructured questions) | Questions where a researcher asks participants to provide a verbal or textual response |
| secondary data | Source information that has been previously collected for other purposes (internal or external) |
| focus groups | Small groups of individuals (usually 6–12) who delve deeply into topics of interest |
| Primary research technique | behavioral observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, social listening, survey research, and experimental research. |
| Syndicated marketing research companies | Source of secondary data for marketing research that is collected by a marketing research company and can be purchased by organizations |
