| We can help you with Internet Market Research |
Hundreds of professional consultancies employ thousands of researchers to find answers to questions put by clients about how best to grow their business. A large corporation may spend millions commissioning customer surveys, opinion polls, interviews, focus groups etc. but even so there have been some spectacular failures, because market research is not an exact science. Small firms may be shy of this new science because of cost and risk but they too need help to grow just like the big firms. How can it help them?
A businessman starting out or expanding can look to market research to supply answers which he cannot get for himself, for reasons of time, geography, language, culture etc. If he gets the answers, he can adapt his plans so as to minimise risk of failure. This is true for all sizes of business, although with a difference in scale. A multi-national may be planning to build factory and distribution facilities round the other side of the world, but you may be thinking about opening an outlet in the next town. Both of you need answers, but to different questions. Market research delivers its answers as facts and figures, in two categories (you need to know some of the jargon used by the industry). The first is Primary Data which is information obtained by talking to people directly to collect their opinions and preferences, focussed specifically on your problem. It could be obtained by discussing your hopes with family, friends, staff and customers, This Local Primary Data should be very highly valued compared to data from the mouths of strangers in some distant place. Observations and experiments are also useful – you might spend a weekend in the town you plan to trade in, just watching, listening, looking for your competition, looking at estate agents and employment agencies etc to get a feel for the town as a place to do business.  Commercial Primary Data answers more general questions about your market in places not so local to you, and may be only partly relevant. It has to be paid for and is usually collected by students or other casual workers in places where people congregate, then gathered up and passed through many processes of sorting, merging and analysis before ending up in a report somewhere on the worldwide web, where it contributes to the second category, Secondary Data, available to anybody on a seemingly infinite range of topics. Somewhere in a vast mass of records is the evidence you need to support or reject your idea.
Secondary Data is abundant, although often compiled into comprehensive online subscription-only databases often accessible via your city library or university together with innumerable printed records. Thousands of large organisations including governments publish reports, statistics, censuses, directories, indexes, yearbooks, journals, monographs etc, on every topic imaginable. Often, results of a search will include irrelevant information but it can be photocopied, cleaned, reduced and merged to reveal the answers although at some cost in time and effort. But the ongoing transfer of printed material on to the internet makes most existing secondary data accessible without the need to even leave the office, which is why it is often called “desk data” . Once captured it can be processed into tables, graphs or whatever best reveals the answer.  Not to be overlooked is Internal Secondary Data coming out of your own business records, your sales and purchase ledgers, your expenses, your final accounts for past years, your general trading record, all yielding priceless clues about how your business might grow. And of course you can obtain it yourself, if you have the time.
Common sense says that external secondary data sources should be searched first on the internet to see whether anything published free comes close to what is needed, before considering the time delay and expense of obtaining commercial primary data. And local primary data should be gathered at the start of the research Kittiwake offers Internet searching for information relevant to your problem, using advanced search software which finds maximum results in the shortest time. Then present the material in the clearest way for you to consider. Kittiwake can also analyse your business accounts for figures which when interpreted alongside other data can show valuable trend information in your business We will willingly discuss this with you without charge, and offer our advice for you to consider. |