(Textbook Page 83)
This unit explores how to access and use information that may have been commissioned, collected and analysed in the past for some other purpose or designed prospectively to fill a market need. It is a cost-effective way to get answer to many of the issues marketers need to resolve.
• Because of the nearly universal and increasingly faster access to internet search engines, a wealth of secondary information is now readily accessible. It is less expensive and can be obtained faster than primary research.
• Secondary data is often relegated to a supporting role, and not used as extensively as it could be, because many people are unaware of possible sources and value of it. They may not have the experience to identify and organize the data and stretch it to answer current needs. It tends to play a more significant role when budgets are tight and when the research question is less strategic.
• The most common way to start secondary searches these days is to type key words into a search engine, but the volume of results can be overwhelming and few look beyond the first page. Paid prioritization and reputation management may populate that first page with false, biased or misleading information.
• Wikipedia can be a good stepping off point, with many eyes on the collaborative, open content to judge and update its veracity.
• Most secondary data is sourced from a company’s own internal records, or from external sources such as government agencies, geodemographics, syndicated research and published material from trade organizations, journals, magazine, blogs etc..
1. Many companies warehouse their private, internal marketing research information on their intranet. Explicit decisions must be made to collect and organize the information in formats that can be conveniently accessed and processed.
o Customer relationship management (CRM) programs are among the richest sources of secondary data.
o Sales over several years, tracked alongside spend on marketing initiatives is typically readily available.
o Establishing a centralized data warehouse of research conducted by the organization ensures future access to useful historical data, even if staff move on.
2. Geodemographics is used to micro-target a population that will be most likely to use your product or service and to locate physical operations. This is accomplished by analyzing information about customer location and movement, and demographics such as age, household type, size, education and income at a very granular level. Layers of other information, such as attitudinal or psychographic profiling give insight into what motivates clusters of consumers. The profiles can be linked to clients’ customer data bases.
3. Government Agencies in most countries collect a large amount of information by way of the census, sample surveys, trade figures, income, expenditures and so on. This textbook unit lists significant providers in the USA, Canada and other countries.
4. Syndicated Data is information collected by an organization to sell in a standardized format to several clients with similar information needs. This is an excellent way to stay up-to-date and gain competitive intelligence quickly and without the expense of primary research. Data can come from shared cost surveys, diary panels or passive data collections (e.g. grocery scanning etc.).
5. Published material, such as blog posts, newspaper and new service articles, editorials and classified advertising is abundant. Competitive information can be gleaned from classified ads – what type of skills are companies looking for? Trade associations conduct research and publish reports on behalf of their members
Data from any source must be scrutinized before it is included in any reports provided to marketing decision-makers. This textbook unit lists key questions that should be asked to ascertain the quality of the data.
The person who retrieves and passes along secondary information has a responsibility to:
o Provide the proper and complete citation for the original data source, including the organization that paid for the research
o State the purpose of the original research that produced this information and include the date, sample size and sampling methodology.
o Provide the actual question wording for any data points used and indicate if any differences identified are statistically significant and meaningful.
If secondary data is to add value to the marketing decision-making process, it must be:
o Stored in a form that can be easily used for the immediate purpose and for the future. This means being collected, moved to a central location and catalogued.
o Integrated into analysis.
Data mining refers to gleaning important information from large data bases using sophisticated and robust data analysis techniques.
o It requires a data warehouse in which internal information and external secondary information is archived an a logical and easily accessible manner.
o It takes time to pull data into statistical analysis and simmer it down to meaningful and digestible insights.
o Data mining is often used as the second main procedure in market segmentation. Primary research is undertaken to create the segments. Internal customer data can then be ‘tagged’ with the segments to link the two sets of information.
• Obtaining data in a spreadsheet format is the first step in the analysis process. Data can often be scraped into formats that an be used in standard analysis applications.
• Once secured, it can be used in a statistical analysis. Spreadsheet programs like Excel, or statistics programs like R, Phython, SPSS or SAS will make multiple iterations and test situations easier and quicker.
• Whether further analyzed or not, it would need to be formatted for presentation in order to maximize the ability of users to understand the information. Presentation methods are handled later in this textbook.
