Marketing Research, 11th Edition

CHAPTER 4Secondary Data, Big Data, and Data Analytics

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Understand the advantages and disadvantages of secondary data.
2. Comprehend data mining and behavioral targeting.
3. Learn the advantages of Big Data and Data Analytics, how to make it actionable, and the importance of data visualization.

What are secondary data? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How is Big Data and Data Analytics disrupting the field of market intelligence? What role does data visualization play in the intelligence process? You will learn the answers to these questions in this chapter.

Nature of Secondary Data

Secondary data consist of information that has already been gathered and might be relevant to the problem at hand. Primary data, in contrast, are survey, observation, and experiment data collected to solve a particular problem. It is highly unlikely that any marketing research problem is entirely unique or has never occurred before. It is also probable that someone else has investigated the problem or one similar to it in the past. Therefore, secondary data can be a cost-effective and efficient means of obtaining information for marketing research. There are two basic sources of secondary data: the company itself (internal databases) and other organizations, such as Acxion (external databases).

secondary data

Data that have been previously gathered.

primary data

New data gathered ...