Welcome back. For your assignment at the end of this course, you'll be asked to make a recommendation about how to divide up the budget of dollars for a project. In this lesson, I will explain the thought process behind budgeting for your research project. You see, internal and secondary research can be free. You also may need to consider paid sources including primary research. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to recommend a budget for a market research plan. Let's get started. Now that you've collected and studied your secondary and internal research or done your desk research, it's time to incorporate it into a plan. This initial research will make you better informed and help you understand the landscape better. It will enable you to recommend additional research if needed and shape a proper proposal. You've also done your due diligence. The next step is determine whether primary research is needed to shape a proper primary research response given the constraints and, bearing in mind, what we've learned through desk research. There are two places to pay for research and the first one is at the secondary research stage where you may decide that there's valuable research that will help pave the way for other research. Let me give you an example, let's look at the cell phone market for starters. The cell phone market changes pretty much every quarter and usually drastically changes every year. So you need to update research on the cell phone market to look at who the players are, who's lost market share, who's gained market share, what the different preferences that people want in terms of smartphones are, and data plans, and other things like apps and so forth. If you were to do a market research study, you'd need to gather any internal information that the company may have first. And you need to gather whatever secondary research you can find based on certain demographics or occupational needs. Then, you might actually say to a client, that I need to buy the 2017 report on cellular phone trends or mobile phone trends from eMarketer.com, or the national telecom association, or whatever. You could buy data there, that would actually help expand your thinking as you start to prepare a primary research plan after that. It could potentially tell you the size of market competitive factors, behavioral changes in attitudes, and so on. It might even tell you that Gen-Z customers have different preferences to millennials, to Gen-Xers, and to boomers. You're going to see these differences in different types of reports. Now these reports can be pretty expensive. It could be a $5000 report. It could be a $50000 report. But it gives you information that will help expand the big picture again. That's one place you can spend money. If I'm a researcher and I've been approached by a client who wants to introduce a new smartphone, the client may present the strengths and weaknesses of it. They may tell me, we're going to target it on the east coast first, and then the west coast. I might ask the client if they have the latest cellular telephone information. If they don't have that, then I'd say, you might want to think about buying it because I want to see a few things first. You could start the budget process early or in the pre-proposal stage or you could say, we'll need to have that so we can make recommendations later. You can do secondary research in terms of helping to prepare your research plan overall. Or you can use it in terms of your analysis, in terms of, like, a forecast, or market share, or other things like that. Secondary research is not fully constrained to the proposal process. It's actually part of the market research process as well. You could ask for it early. Or you could ask for it as part of the actual market research process. Additionally, the secondary research actually helps refine the problem to devise a more appropriate research plan. We saw that in the example of the cruise line analysis we discussed earlier. They originally thought the problem was just responding to the 9/11 tragedy. But our research helped refine the problem by revealing that the problem wasn't tragedy but it was the demographic and the age that they were targeting. There had been a tragedy and it did impact the cruise line industry. But theirs was a compound problem of age and also not having enough pipeline of new customers. This was all happening at the same time of the tragedy. So we proposed doing a different type of study with a sample of younger cruisers or people that had never cruised before and gained some fabulous insights. While initiating market research, everything is fluid. You start with the internal and secondary research that is often free and at your fingertips as you do what you can with the information you have available that leads to greater clarity about what comes next and where to budget spending on the more expensive primary research. Many times a client will come to you with what they think the research should be. And nine times out of 10, they're probably right. However, they're looking at it through their lens. They may not be a trained researcher which is why they need your professional services. They can give you a certain amount of information and you can gather more information or you can request it. Then, from there you can assess several things. First, whether or not you can do the project. Second, whether the project is as the client supposed. Is it as cut and dry as they thought? Will the customer satisfaction they request do the job? Or, third, in order to get at the true answer, will you need to recommend something different or change the plan? All of these trajectories will influence your budgeting decisions. Regarding your course project, the primary consideration is to be able to explain and support whatever decisions and recommendations you make. That goes for your marketing research plan itself in the budget.
