What you’ll learn to do: recognize alternative techniques for conducting marketing research, including primary and secondary research methods

The five-step marketing research process provides a well-structured approach to follow any time you have a marketing problem that research can help you solve. What type(s) of research you conduct depends on the kind of information needed to solve your problem. Sometimes you can solve the problem using secondary data someone else has already collected for another purpose. At other times, you will need to collect your own data through primary research focused expressly on your problem.

The next section of this module discusses common methods for conducting secondary and primary research. As you become familiar with these techniques, you will learn which marketing research methods tend to be most appropriate for which sorts of problems.