What are the different types of market research?
Well, you can categorize in all kinds of ways. The easiest way, and the simplest, by the way, I suppose (in some ways it is anyway), is called 'secondary research', and that just means that someone else has done the research; where you're looking up some figures and you don't have to do anything, running around yourself and you just look and see what you've got and you say, 'okay, I know in this area of town where I want to start my restaurant that I've got a hundred thousand people that like Vietnamese food, so that's pretty good, that's it.' You find that out from the chamber of commerce, a lot of times you can find a lot of information like that, about your target market from the chamber of commerce and what they have and so forth. Or, if there's a product that's pricey or not pricey you can find out all the demographics that way. So that's secondary research.'Primary research' is really where you actually do it, somehow, some way yourself. The three basic ways used to be interviews, which can either can be face-to-face or interception: you go to a front of a grocery store or something like that and you're talking to people, or telephone or mail. They all have their advantages or disadvantages. Now the Internet, of course, is a tremendous one also. The cautionary notes are you want to make sure that they're representative of the people; representing this big segment. If they're not representative, you might as well save your money, you're not getting anything, you're not learning anything.
