As well as understanding your market, you can also use secondary research to examine factors inside your business, such as sales figures and financial records.
Secondary research examples include going online and searching for what you need, going to a library to read through books, reading news papers / magazines and journals. Also other methods such as data collection organizations or periodicals.
Companies such as Rajar, National Readership Survey (NRS) and BARB collect data for other people people to use as secondary research, they usually sell the findings to other media companies who also use it as secondary research.
This is a graph of 'average weekly viewings' from BARB.
Advantages:
Secondary research examples include going online and searching for what you need, going to a library to read through books, reading news papers / magazines and journals. Also other methods such as data collection organizations or periodicals.
Companies such as Rajar, National Readership Survey (NRS) and BARB collect data for other people people to use as secondary research, they usually sell the findings to other media companies who also use it as secondary research.
Advantages:
- Because somebody has published the data for people to use, it saves time.
- It is often cheaper than doing primary research and collecting all the data yourself.
- It may allow you access to data you couldn't get.
Disadvantages:
- In some cases it's quite expensive.
- You may have less control over how the data was collected.
- There may be biases in the data that you wouldn't know about.
- the answers might not fit your research questions.
- The data could be really old therefore no giving you correct answers.