Primary and secondary Data - Essay Example

With the transformation of the globe, various trends of globalization are paving the way for new business opportunities. The ease of getting access to information has significantly beefed up the level of competition that exists in the global markets. In order to gain advantage in this competition, it has become very necessary for the companies to undertake significant amount of research before the process of launching a new product or service in the market. The conduction of research helps in the process of estimating the needs as well as the demands of the market.

About the company The company that has been considered in this case is California based Monster Energy Corporation. Talking about the company, it can be said that it is one of the leading marketer and distributor of various energy drinks and beverages. Some of the most popular brands under the product portfolio of the company are Monster Energy, Hansen’s, Peace Tea, Worx Energy, Blue Sky etc (Monster Energy Company, 2012). Talking about the market segmentation for the company’s products, the focus for the US markets mainly depends on the young audience.

Also, the company’s products are segmented and targeted towards the masses of some of the foreign markets which are spread in the developing as well as the developed regions. In this case, it has been assumed that the company is trying to launch a new energy based drink for the US market. The speciality of the new product is that this energy drink is exclusively for the female audience. Hence, the audience that needs to be segmented in this case is mostly the young female population residing in the US.

Different types of data and research methodology Market research is a very vast domain, which comprises different kinds of approaches, tools and techniques. While trying to conduct a market research, it needs to be highlighted that the data can be of two types. There can be primary or secondary data. Primary data are gathered by the researcher for the purpose of finding more relevant information for the project at hand (Burns and Bush, 2006, p. 146). On the contrary, secondary data are already available as some other researcher has actually collected or compiled the data for relevant usage in their respective project (Zikmund and Babin, 2007, p. 160). Now, while discussing the types of research methodology, it can be said that it can be either descriptive, exploratory or causal in nature.

Descriptive research is conducted when the main objective is to describe market related characteristics. Exploratory research is done when the focus is to discover new insights in regards to the main research question. Causal research is done when the researcher wants to explore a particular cause and effect kind of a relationship (Malhotra and Dash, 2008, p. 81). 5 different types of secondary research The five different types of secondary research that are available to the researcher are: government publications, online databases, data from previous research available in various research papers and research magazines, published magazines, secondary data from syndicate organizations.

Nature of Research required for the new product Taking into consideration the nature of the product, it can be appropriate to do a secondary research followed by a primary research to gauge the reaction of the consumers in regards to the