Secondary Market Research — Evaluation

Secondary market research (desk research) gathers second-hand data that already exists. This secondary data and information have already been collected by someone else — usually another company for a different research purpose.

Secondary market research is especially useful for businesses trying to identify the nature of the market as it provides insights into to changes and trends in an industry. This will help the firm to devise marketing strategies in response to these market changes.

Advantages of secondary market research

Benefits of conducting secondary market research include the following:

1. Faster. It is faster as time only needs to be spent on finding the right publication as findings are already available. Hence, appropriate data and information can be obtained very quickly without the need to design complicated data-gathering methods.
2. Cheaper. Data and information can be fairly cheap to obtain, and definitely much cheaper than primary research. Many online sources are available to the general public for free apart from market intelligence reports which usually cost a few thousand dollars.
3. More sources. Secondary research is more accessible as more sources are publicly available to anybody, so managers can see a bigger picture. Also, it allows for comparison of data from different sources. As findings are based on larger samples, the research results are more statistically valid.