Hello, in this lesson we are going to discuss the importance of secondary and internal research in the planning process. You see, secondary and internal research can be helpful in your research response to both internal and external clients. It helps shape the big picture and puts the business problem and research opportunity into perspective. Plus it can give you context and an orientation. Secondary or internal research can provide a baseline and can often be free or relatively a low cost to conduct. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to show the importance of these two types of research in your planning process. Now let me tell you what I think when I say, desk research. For many years, the term desk research interchangeably with secondary research, I believe it to be a combination of secondary and internal research. I interpret desk research to mean, you don't have to collect information from your subjects, you can do it at your desk. While this implies secondary research, internal research such as a company complaint log or web analytics can be studied from one's desk. Secondary and internal research are important to the planning process because they allow you to expand your vision. Otherwise, you're working with a problem and you're confined to being within that problem. Secondary research opens up your field of vision. You see things that other people have done and you actually get statistics and data that help frame the problem or the opportunity. The same thing with internal research here is that you get a better context of what the situation is in times where a client will tell you that they need to stop the bleeding such as, we're losing market share. We need to stop the bleeding, so we need market research to figure that out. Internal research will give you a better assessment in terms of what could be going on around this problem. It could also give you some other assets that they've done. They could have done research two years ago, or implemented a new CRM system. Or you might find some new data, such as some web analytic data, that will help reinforce the problem or identify new opportunities or new ways to look at it. These two pieces put together can really expose a better picture or avoid blind spots in terms of how a researcher needs to plan down the line. It's more information, basically. A researcher gets information and tries to extrapolate and give a client a better plan. But when the client gives them very minimal data, they really don't know. When that happens, the choices are few. And so when they get internal or conduct secondary research, it helps fill in the blanks in terms of determining, is there a better way to do this or being able to understand the environment better. You can also gather secondary research to establish a baseline. There are lots of examples, somebody could say, we want to launch a new product and so we need the market research. And as a result, they come to you with this hypothesis, this question, this opportunity and you can actually just go out there, and you can just start measuring the market place. However, when you gather internal and secondary research, you may quickly find out that even before the market research process has started, there may or may not be as many opportunities as they think. For example, imagine somebody who might want to start up a new online education program in a specific discipline. You go find out that in their market place there's not enough people to even support such a program, that helps form their decision. You cannot just do a survey as a methodology in that case. You might actually go right to the employer to find out whether or not they would actually have a significant market share. At times a client might approach you with the intention to add new products based on less than scientific data. It may be a hunch, or based on apparent trends that have not really been tested. Let me give you a real example. We had a client come up to us and she said, we want to launch a graduate certificate in crime scene management. Her hypothesis was, my faculty believe that there is a place for this, because we have some of the greatest experts at our institution. And we're very well connected with the legal community, and they want to see more discipline around this field. She also said that, and the students would be very, very interested in it. We offer a number of criminology courses. What's going on in my head here is asking the question, is this really a matter of what the marketplace looks like, and will this work? The objective here was to find better target market information, and they wanted market research to identify what the marketing message could be. So I'm thinking to myself that this is really too trendy or CSI or NCIS or every other show like that. So when we went out there and ultimately did some market research, we actually ended up finding out through internal research and secondary research that we conducted, it was a highly specialized field. And their approach was an interdisciplinary one toward crime scene management. The problem was that, after we had done the reasearch, we determined that this would not be a good program because a lawyer would not be interested in it because they already have a law degree. They don't need a science degree on top of that for their job. We also learned that, for something in this field to be successful, you really need to have a master's degree and a graduate certificate which was proposed would not work. The only audience that it would have potentially appealed to would have been some members of the law enforcement community. So then we looked at the law enforcement community in terms of a specific profile, and there was not enough of the them in the marketplaces to justify a program. The secondary research provided some insight around market size. Ultimately, it helped shape us in doing some in depth interviewing as opposed to wide surveying our target population because we needed to know among the decision makers, whether or not this program was a good idea. So to wrap up, the big picture here was initially, what's our marketing message, and what target markets should we target this to? As we went through and gathered the little internal research we got and the secondary research we found. We formulated a different plan for our market research. A quantitative survey wouldn't have helped us because there was a lot of fragmentation. Ultimately, it became a opinion leader type of survey. An interview with 12 to 15 decision makers in the legal law enforcement and science community. The secondary research basically dictated a different path and that shows the value of performing secondary and internal research before beginning the market research process.
