Production research

Production research involves anything to do with producing the product. The purpose of production research is to research costs and other associated problems related to the producton of any particular product. For example if a company was making a film they would have to research all the costs of cameras, actors, locations and

Market research

Market research is the name given to research of a particular market to examine the competition. Market research involves researching competitiors and everything associated with creating a product. For example if a new fast food resteraunt was being planned they would have to examine other fast food locations and takings like mcdonalds for example. Or if a pair of shoes were being designed other shoes would have to be reviewed on their style and takings, also selling points would have to be researched. Most of this would be secondary  and quantitative research.

Audience research

Audience research is, as the name suggests researching the audience. Basically audience research involves finding out about the audience of a product for example. Some of the research that might be conducted for audience research involves finding out things like the age, sex and numbers of the audience that your product will attract. The reason for this is so that when thinking of creating your product you have information as to the rough numbers of people that your product might attract.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is basically collecting research involving peoples opinions. The main difference and advantage over quantitative research is the fact that instead of just getting the numbers of your question you would get peoples opinion too by asking an open question. This could be used for example when a film company makes a film and gets the results that inlcudes peoples opinions. The advantages of this would be that the company can then learn how to improve via peoples comments.

Quantitative Reseach

As the name suggests Quantitative research is basically research that deals with the quantities of things, quantitative research methods are methods of measuring quantity. Primary and Secondary research methods can be used when dealing with quantitative research and the results are usually number based dealing with viewing figures, ratings and other things like such. An example of Quantitative research is if a film company had just released a film and they wanted the ratings if they released a survey of weather the people who saw it liked it or didnt and retreived the results of 200 no and 600 yes.

Secondary research

Secondary research is basically just collecting your desired information, looking up the information online, in books or anywehere accessible where the data is already recorded for you. This makes secondary research far cheaper and easier than primary research for the reason that no research plans and surveys etc are to be produced.

An example of secondary research is; say for example a film company needed to check how well a film did in order to decide on the creation of a second one, if they went on forums and checked various websites, reviews or charts they could gather secondary research this way.

Although secondary research can be far easier to obtain than primary research it may not cover all the elements of information that you wish to find out and it can be necessary to have information that doesnt already exist. Also the sources of the information must all be referenced and checked to make certain that it is all reliable.

Primary research

Primary research Is basically the name given when people for example marketers conduct their own research and get original data by using surverys and other methods. Primary research is often conducted after some info has already been researched by using secondary research methods.

In the industry there are companies that offer to assist marketers in primary research, for example from Full-Service Market Research Firms that complete the entire research plan for a client to Research Tools Suppliers who provide data collection tools.

One reason that primary research is good for researching in the industry is because it can be tailored to be as specific as you want so for example if in the secondary research there wasnt enough information and it wasnt set into specific groups when the primary research is conducted any info you choose can be returned.

The worse side of primary research is that it can obviously be a lot more expensive and time consuming than mereley doing secondary research not only this but when conducting primary research a research plan is needed and low feedback rates should be expected.