Primary and secondary market research

Primary market research is first-hand information that you collect yourself for a specific purpose, such as testing whether your own product idea appeals to your target customers. Secondary market research is information that already exists because someone else collected it for a different purpose, such as published sales figures or an industry report.

Primary methods include observation, asking people directly through questionnaires, surveys and interviews, gathering a small group for a focus group, running a consumer trial, and test marketing (sometimes called a pilot). You choose the method, and any questions, so the evidence is aimed at your research purpose, not someone else's.

Weighing up the two types

Research type	Advantages	Disadvantages
Primary	Current; directly relevant to your product or situation; detailed; you control how it is collected.	Time-consuming and costly; difficult to collect; may need more people to help; qualitative responses can be hard to interpret.
Secondary	Quicker and cheaper to obtain; readily available; sometimes covers large amounts of existing information.	Potentially outdated; less specific to your purpose; reliability may be uncertain because it was collected for another reason.

Imagine you are planning to sell a small batch of your own phone case designs at a school summer fair. A published report on how much people spend on phone cases is secondary research: it is quick to find, but it will not tell you which of your designs pupils at your own school would actually buy. Test marketing a small batch of your designs at the fair is primary research: it shows which designs sell and which are left on the table, but it uses up materials and takes up your Saturday. Neither type is automatically better; each suits a different question.

Weighing up the two types

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