Types of marketing research

Marketing research, as a sub-set aspect of marketing activities, can be divided into the following parts:

* Primary research (also known as field research), which involves the conduction and compilation of research for the purpose it was intended.
* Secondary research (also referred to as desk research), is initially conducted for one purpose, but often used to support another purpose or end goal.

By these definitions, an example of primary research would be market research conducted into health foods, which is used solely to ascertain the needs/wants of the target market for health foods. Secondary research, again according to the above definition, would be research pertaining to health foods, but used by a firm wishing to develop an unrelated product.

Primary research is often expensive to prepare, collect and interpret from data to information. Nonetheless, while secondary research is relatively inexpensive, it often can become outdated and outmoded, given it is used for a purpose other than for which is was intended. Primary research can also be broken down into quantitative research and qualitative research, which as the labels suggest, pertain to numerical and non-numerical research methods, techniques. The appropriateness of each mode of research depends on whether data can be quantified (quantitative research), or whether subjective, non-numeric or abstract concepts are required to be studied (qualitative research).

There also exists additional modes of marketing research, which are:

* Exploratory research, pertaining to research that investigates an assumption.
* Descriptive research, which as the label suggests, describes "what is".
* Predictive research, meaning research conducted to predict a future occurrence.
* Conclusive research, for the purpose of deriving a conclusion via a research process.