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C H A P T E R

Secondary Research

M
arketing research falls into two main categories: primary
research and secondary research. The distinction between them
is fairly simple: Primary research is original work done with your
particular study objectives in mind. Secondary research is the use
of previously existing resources to meet your research goals.
Though much of this book focuses on primary research, it’s
important to point out that a lot of time and money can be saved if
you first do a bit of poking around to see what other work has
already been done in your area of interest. There’s little sense in
reinventing the wheel, and we highly recommend that you leverage
existing sources of research information before committing to more
time-consuming and expensive methods.
Secondary research has many uses, and can come in many
forms. In some cases, it might be the only way to cost-effectively
obtain certain types of data. We find secondary research especially
useful in informing our study development process by identifying
issues that impact the industry and marketplace of clients for whom
we are conducting primary research projects. Beyond simply
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Secondary Research 19

obtaining background on a subject, we’ve often been able to elimi-

nate the need to conduct primary research by finding key data
points hidden in research that we acquired for little or no cost.
Any secondary research you might find began its life much as
your own primary research would. Someone, at some point, estab-
lished study objectives, executed a survey or other data collection
method, and analyzed the results. Published results might take the
form of an official “syndicated” study that is available for purchase,
or a few key factoids released to the press for inclusion in a news
article. Results might be published in a scholarly journal, a govern-
ment-sponsored information database, or a host of other resources.
A vast amount of secondary research is available, and some of it
might be exactly what you need. The key is knowing where to look.

FREE (OR LOW-COST) SOURCES OF SECONDARY RESEARCH

In many cases, you can get valuable data at no cost other than your
time: making some phone calls, searching the Web, or making a trip
to the libraries in your area. Here we provide reviews of some of the
major sources of free research. In the section titled Reference
Sources later in this chapter, we list sources and their URLs. Later
in the book, we provide specific examples of how to find answers
to particular strategic questions.

Government Publications
Your tax dollars go to pay for an astounding number of things, and
market research is one of them. Government agencies like the U.S.
Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau regularly com-
mission high-quality (expensive) studies about the economy and
about the consumers and businesses that form it. International
agencies and foreign governments do the same. In recent years,
much of this information has been made accessible via the Web, so
a good first stop in your search should be the main Web pages of
the government agencies responsible for producing these reports.
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General Press
Simply searching the back archives of major newspapers and mag-
azines can yield quite a bit of useful data. Like you, reporters scour
the same resources for interesting bits of data to include in their
articles. If they’ve done the dirty work for you, why not profit from
their efforts? You’ll often be able to find references back to the orig-
inal study that you can follow up on, view the entire study, or find
even more pertinent data. In addition to data dug up in their own
searches, reporters often receive copies of studies or press packets
of information from studies that market research companies are
promoting for sale (see Paid Sources of Secondary Research).
Reporters may include just the piece of data you need in an article
they are writing, and save you the expense of having to purchase the
research results. Sometimes the free data isn’t sufficient for your
project and you’ll want to purchase the study; but at the very least,
searching press archives is another avenue for discovering these
studies.

Industry Journals
Industry journals are magazines that are dedicated to covering even
the most esoteric goings-on in their particular business. In addition
to providing news such as business mergers, new product launches,
CEO appointments, and the like, trade journals often quote useful
statistics of one kind or another. You won’t find these journals in the
supermarket magazine section, so you’ll have to do a bit of hunting
to find the ones you want. Fortunately, the Web comes to the res-
cue. Sites like Looksmart (www.looksmart.com) and DirectHit
(www.directhit.com) have excellent hierarchical menus and search
tools that allow you to ferret out an amazing number of trade jour-
nals that either are reprinted on the Web, or provide the contact
information necessary to subscribe to the print editions or to search
back issues. The National Directory of Magazines (www.media
finder.com/mag_home.cfm) maintains links to a vast array of peri-
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odicals, including industry and trade publications. If you aren’t able

to find trade journals directly, chances are that an industry or trade
association can point you in the right direction.

Trade Associations
If a trade journal doesn’t exist for the industry you are attempting
to study, chances are that there is still an organization that exists to
promote the common interests of people in that line of business.
These groups are treasure chests of useful information and people.
Larger associations often publish major industry journals and spon-
sor industry-wide research. If not, they will likely have available a
list of useful publications and fact sheets about their constituency.
Even better, the staff at these organizations can usually point you in
the right direction more quickly than your own detective skills
would.

Public Company SEC Filings

Publicly-traded companies regularly file reports with the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC). These reports may contain
explicitly useful marketplace data, such as estimates of market size
or growth prospects, though this is more the exception than the
norm. What they all have, however, is information about financial
performance that can be creatively used to deduce all kinds of
important data points. We give specific examples of “creative
deduction” in Part II, where we address the strategic application of
market research tools. Public company filings can usually be found
on the companies’ Web sites, but an even more convenient way to
locate them is through EDGAR Online (www.edgar-online.com).
Edgar allows you to search for public company filings by company
name, ticker symbol, industry classification, or key word; you can
quickly zero in on the companies you want to look at. Currently
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free user registration is required to access EDGAR; select “Visitor

Membership.”

Investment Brokerages and Information Services

Perhaps no one puts as many brains and dollars behind understand-
ing the marketplace as do the firms that sell investment services.
Analysts constantly monitor and assess various industries’ poten-
tial, and often write opinions on the future of various industry sec-
tors and of companies within those sectors. These opinions and
analyses can be fantastic sources of information that can help satis-
fy your research needs. Fortunately, much of the information is
available, free of charge, via the Web sites of investment and bro-
kerage houses.

Library Reference Desk

In this day of electronic information, it might seem outmoded to sug-
gest a visit to a person in the musty old library. Beware preconceived
notions! Reference librarians spend most of their education and their
entire careers refining the art of finding information (however eso-
teric it might be). Though much information is available online,
many resources have not yet been computerized. Even those that
have been can be difficult to ferret out. Reference librarians know
where to go, online or off, so pay them a visit before you spend time
spinning your own wheels. Librarians love to help researchers and
they’ll often go out of their way to make your life easier.

Newsgroups and UseNet

USENET is one of the oldest online institutions and consists of
thousands of publicly available discussion groups. These discus-
sion groups are commonly known as Newsgroups, even though
you’ll be more likely to find discussions than news articles there.
People in USENET groups may be discussing topics of broad or
esoteric appeal. Chances are good that there will be a group dis-