Market research is pursued to understand consumer needs, market trends, and competitive dynamics to inform business decisions. Its primary purpose is to provide data-driven insights that reduce risks and identify opportunities. Primary research involves collecting new data directly from sources through methods like surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This type of research offers specific insights tailored to a company's unique questions. Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing existing data from sources such as industry reports, market studies, and public databases. It provides a broader context and helps validate findings from primary research.
Applications of market research include product development, where it identifies consumer needs and preferences, ensuring new products meet market demands. It also supports pricing strategies by understanding what consumers are willing to pay and analyzing competitors' pricing. In marketing and advertising, market research helps create targeted campaigns that effectively reach and engage specific audience segments. Additionally, it assesses market potential and forecasts trends, aiding decisions about market entry or expansion. By differentiating between primary and secondary research, businesses can gather comprehensive insights to guide strategic planning and drive success.
There is something of an overlap between market and industry research. Market and industry research both examine the allocation of goods and services, but market research does so more from the perspective of the customer and industry research more from the perspective of the producer or vendor. Both types of research generally analyze market share, key competitors and peers in an industry, industry size and trends, business environment and risks. Market research also analyzes demographics and consumer behavior. While this section covers many of the same sources listed in the industry research guide, it emphasizes features of these resources that provide data and information on market demographics and consumer behavior.
Statista provides statistical data on many topics including media, business, politics, society, technology and education. Sources include market reports, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases.
You have access to Statista's Dossier feature, which is a fancy word for market reports.
Statista Dossiers: Market Reports on Specific Subject Matters — From Apple and e-commerce to social networking in China -- our dossiers give an insight into a diverse range of subjects and topic areas.
If you need a bit of help searching Statista, watch a tutorial here.
Business Source Elite is our newest business database. It is a mostly full-text, major business resource which includes access to market research reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and Harvard Business Review.
The advanced search page allows limiting by Publication Type, and for market research we suggest using the Industry Profile type.
ProQuest Central is our most popular business database. It includes a sub-collection called Business Market Research:
Business Market Research Collection (1986 - current): contains company, industry, economic and geopolitical market research Hoover's Company Profiles, OxResearch, and Snapshots.
If you are researching marketing or market shares, there are a few options in Advanced Search that might help you find what you are looking for.
Document Type allows you to limit your results to specific types of documents. We suggest checking these options for market research:
You can also search by company or NAICS code.