Methods of research

Task 5-

It is important to research before planning an advertising campaign as it is important that you gather all of the information that you need before you begin this campaign. It is also important that they collect this information as they may not get all of the facts right and the campaign may not make sense.

There are many different types of research and these are audience research, production research and market research.


Audience research:

There are four basic types of audience research, these include; descriptive research, analytical research, predictive research and tracking research.

Description research: Descriptive search is research that describes the audience and their characteristics, for example, how old they are? and where they live?.

Analytical research: Analytical research is research that seeks to understand what motivates an audience.

Predictive research: Predictive research are 'what if?' situations.

Tracking research: Tracking research monitors changes that happen through a period of time.



Market research:

Market research is the research that is conducted to help decide what market a company should be selling certain merchandise to, for example, if a company was selling aftershave the market would be targeted at men. Companies need to be aware of who their competitors are and need to be aware of growth potential.

Things that companies need to be aware of are things such as what other products are similar that are on the market at the same time, what other companies sales figures are compared to that companies, what the other companies may do better, ho similar and competitive the prices are, what cane be done to improve the product and what their companies unique selling point is.

Companies need to make sure that they are trying to achieve their marketing objectives, this means that they are trying to reach the goals that the company has set for themselves to ensure that they are giving out the best product that values money and the costs of production.



Production research:

Product research test all of the technology and personnel availability and make sure that planning production and post-production run smoothly, for example do they have staff that can film and edit.

A company in advertising would need some specialized equipment such as apple mac computers, HD quality digital cameras, microphones, headphones.etc. They need to have an editing studio where video editing is able to take place, they also need to have script writers and crew to help the operation run smoothly. The company will also need to consider travelling costs to get to make up and stylists and travel around the filming lot.


Primary research:

Primary research is research that has been performed by the researcher when they research an organisation to answer a specific question about the company. Examples of primary research would e using a questionnaire or surveys to find out the information you need to answer the question. This is also when someone carries out their own research which allows other organisations to correct any issues that are involved in a specific situation.

The advantages to primary research are that the researcher has much more control, this enables to researcher to gather the market research that they require. It also gives the researcher greater control over their results and of how they collect their information.

The disadvantages of primary research are that it costs to be able to do this research and that it takes a lot of time to be able to collect the information that is required. Another disadvantage would be that their is no existing data to help collect the information that you need quicker.

Secondary research:

Secondary research is research that is conducted by someone else that can be used with primary research. Secondary research uses other research that has already been conducted by another person and it allows someone that is conducting a similar pieces of research to use other peoples research to gather the information that they need quicker. This can also be used to create second hand research.

The advantages to secondary research would be that it wouldn't take as long to gather the research a somebody would have already done the research so you could use these numbers to gather your own evidence. Another advantage would be that most pre-existing evidence would be accurate so the researcher would not have to collect a lot of information.

The disadvantages of secondary research is that it may not always be accurate as the evidence may have been taken at a different period of time so the evidence would have changed from that period. Another disadvantage would be that secondary research is that is may not be honest research.


Quantitative research:

Quantitative research is research that can be shown as a set of numbers, can be shown as charts or graphs and can be measured. Questionnaires are usually used and this is also number crunching.

The advantages to quantitative research are that you can have a large sample of information using this research technique. Another advantage is that is relatively easy to distribute and easy to receive the information quickly.

The disadvantages to quantitative research are that it is hard to design a questionnaire that is suitable for the whole of the public to do. Another disadvantage would be that closed questions on a questionnaire cannot be adapted or adjusted in any way.


Qualitative research:

Qualitative research is research that helps to find out peoples feelings, the responses are professional and that they can not really be measured. This research is always about people thoughts and feeling toward a certain topic.

The advantages to qualitative research are that you can find out important information about the development of what people think and how people have changed throughout the time that previous research was made, another advantage would be that you could ask questions that are not as important as some of the other questions asked.

The disadvantages would be that this kind of research is very time consuming and takes a lot of time to be able to collect this information, another disadvantage would be that their would be quite a small sample of people who could fill out this kind of information at one time.