Transcript 4. Secondary Data Nature of Secondary Data Secondary data

4. Secondary Data
Nature of Secondary Data
• Secondary data: data that have been
previously gathered.
• Primary data: new data gathered to help solve
the problem under investigation.
Advantages and Limitations
of Secondary Data
• Advantages: faster and less expensive than
acquiring primary data
• Limitations:
– Lack of availability
– Lack of relevance
– Inaccuracy
– Insufficiency
Objectives for Secondary Data
Research Designs
Broad Objective
Specific Research Example
Fact-finding: seek to uncover all available
info. about some market related topics.
-Identifying consumption patterns
-Tracking trends
Model building: the use of secondary
data to help specify relationships
between 2 or more variables.
-Estimating market potential
-Forecasting sales
-Selecting trade areas and sites
Database marketing: the use of customer
databases to promote one-to-one
relationships with customers and create
precisely targeted promotions.
-Enhancing customer databases
-Developing prospect lists
Data Mining
• The use of powerful computers to dig through volumes of
data to discover patterns about an org.’s customers and
products.
– Market basket analysis analyses anonymous point of sale
transaction databases to identify coinciding purchases/
relationships between products purchased and other retail
shopping info.
– Example: Osco Drugs in the US mined its databases provided by
checkout scanners and found that when men go to its stores to
by baby’s nappies in the evening between 6-8 pm., they
sometimes walk out with a six-pack of beer as well.
Knowing this behavioral pattern, it’s possible for store managers
in supermarket chains to lay out their stores so that these items
are closer together.
Data Mining
• Example: the credit card company probably
track info. about each customer: age, gender,
number of children, job status, income level,
past credit card history, and etc.
The data about these factors will be mined to
find the patterns that make a particular
individual a good or bad credit risk known as
customer discovery.
Data Mining
• When a company knows the identify of the
customer who makes repeated purchases from
the same org., an analysis can be made of
sequences of purchases.
Sequence discovery, the use of data mining to
detect sequence patterns, is popular among direct
marketers, such as catalogue retailer. A catalogue
merchant has info. for each customer such as the
set of products customer buy in every purchase
order.
Sources of Secondary Data
• Internal and proprietary data sources: secondary
data that originate inside the organization
• External data: data created, recorded, or
generated by an entity other than the
researcher’s org.
• Information as a product and its distribution
channels: libraries, the Internet, vendors,
producers, books and periodicals, government
sources, media sources, trade association
sources, commercial sources
Single-Source Data-Integrated
Information
• Diverse types of data offered by a single
company. The data are usually integrated on
the basis of a common variable such as
geographic area or store.
– Example: MRI Cable Report – Mediamark
www.mediamark.com
Integrates info. on cable research including TV
viewing with demographic and product usage info.
Sources for Global Research
• As business has become more global, so has the
secondary data industry.
• International researchers should watch for
certain pitfalls that can be associated with foreign
data and cross-cultural research such as the
unavailability of data in certain countries, the
accuracy of some data may be called into
question, different definitions in economic
terminology in various countries.