which is already available both within and outside the business.
What kinds of Desk Research exist?
1) Firm’s own data - Records on how much certain customers spend and which areas
have the best sales for particular products.
2) Government Statistics - On many topics such as population changes and consumer
spending census data which shows numbers of people in
different age groups and where they live is a useful source of
information.
3) Published market research information - Firms such as MINTEL publish market
reports on different products ranging from
bread and alcohol to insurance.
4) Quality newspapers and magazines - Papers such as “The Independent” and special
marketing magazines provide useful
information on market trends.
Advantages of Desk Research:
* Desk Research is cheaper than field research
* Data is easily found and instantly available
* Easier to establish trends
* A wide choice of data
Disadvantages of Desk Research:
* Desk Research is not always relevant to your needs not specifically about your product
* Information is often out of date
* Problems of interpretation
* Little control over quality in data
What is Field Research?
Field Research is when businesses uses field to find out information that is not readily
available to them.
Methods of field research include the following:
Observation: Looking at and recording what people do and how they behave is an
important part of market research.
Surveys: This involves asking questions of people or organisations. There are a number of
different ways of conducting surveys.
Questionnaires: This involves questioning a large number of people by holding an interview
face to face or through the post.
Newspaper: Readers fill in a questionnaire in the newspaper and return it.
Telephone Surveys: This is when ever organisations phone up individuals and ask them to
answer a number of questions over the telephone.
Personal Interviews: This allows an organisation to find out exactly what the customer is
interested in buying.
Consumer Panel: A selected group of people are given a product and asked to comment
on it in detail.
Test Marketing: This involves marketing a product on a small scale before launching it to
all customers.
Advantages of Field Research:
* The information is up to date
* The information is relevant and specific to your products
* The information is easily understood
* Always available
Disadvantages of Field Research:
* The information is expensive to collect,
* It is time consuming
* It needs a large sample size to be accurate
I had to Create a questionnaire so I designed one making sure that I kept
in mind what I wanted to know about launching a chocolate bar. I had to
arrange my questions to find out:
What my target market is?
* General age group
* Gender
What people like?
* Type of chocolate
* Shape of bar
* Bar fillings
What are people prepared to pay?
* How much money are they prepared to give for a bar?
* How many bars do people buy in a week?
Where do people buy their bars from?
* Which shop do they buy their bars from?
Once I have gathered this information, I will use it to design and launch a
chocolate bar.
On the next page I have shown my Pilot questionnaire. I had to make
certain changes to it as I had not asked any questions about how I would
go about advertising my bar. So I have added in three extra questions to
my final questionnaire to deal with advertising a bar on TV channels and
what time to advertise at.
