Advantages & Disadvantages of

Research Techniques
There are 4 main types of different research techniques
and these are Primary, Secondary, Qualitative &
Quantitative.
Primary Research is when you conduct the research
yourself. A few examples of this would be a questionnaire,
focus groups, interviews and observations.
Secondary Research is when you use already existing
research for your information. A few examples of this are
reports, documentaries and diaries.
Qualitative Research is text-based research, this is any
research, which includes text and not numbers. A few
examples of this are books, websites, newspapers and
mind maps.
Quantitative Research is any research, which is number
based and doesnt involve text. A few examples of this are
graphs, charts and numerical surveys.
There are 3 main types of research, which are conducted
for adverts. The first of these being the NRS, next of these
being BARB and finally Google Analytics. These being
Primary Quantitative research as they are conducted by
the companies themselves and are numerically based.
Once we take this information off them, the information
then becomes secondary as we havent conducted it.
Circulation figures from the NRS
We conduct research for a variety of different reasons. The
main being to find out which type of person we want our
product to be aimed at. We can do this by asking a large
variety of people questions about the product, which we
intend to sell; this can be classed as primary qualitative
research. And once this has been completed, convert the
results form the different people into a quantitative chart
showing who the main type of audience for that product
would be based upon how often this specific type used the
product, how much they would be willing to spend on it
and why they would purchase it, this would be classed as
primary qualitative research

The second main reason for research is so that business

can find issues with their product and find out how they
can fix these issues.
The Next reason for purposes of research is that this can
help give the company a greater idea of what they need to
include with the product. This can be conducted as
secondary research by finding qualitative and quantitative
information on the Internet and by reading in books. By
doing this the company can begin to paint a picture of how
they want their product to be by looking at how other
similar products can be. One of the purposes of this is
market research; this is conducted to find out what the
product needs and how it can be improved to be the best
of its ability. This will usually be done by primary or
secondary qualitative research this usually depends on
questionnaires or interviews, which are either conducted
by the company or found in books or the Internet.
Another purpose is Audience Research, which can be
conducted by Interviews or questionnaires so it is usually
done by primary qualitative research, as it is usually the
company doing it such as the NRS Social Grade, which
breaks down an audience into different stratifications of
society helping us to discover who watches which
programmes at any given time. Now I am giving this
purpose of production research. An example of this is a
Recce, which for this you would need to find out
information such as finding out if it is safe to film in a
certain place or how the weather would be on a day. This
is usually done by secondary research either qualitative or
quantitative research as it would be done on the Internet.
The final reason which I am going to give for the is so that
the company can find a gap within the market for their
product making them able to do something that no other
similar company has every done before helping them to
create the maximum income.
One example of an academic reference is the NRS. This is
the National Readership Survey. The National Readership
Survey provides the most accurate audience research for
digital and print advertising in Britain. They mainly provide
us with information such as what type of person is more
likely to watch any specific channel at any time.

Academic References
Gerard J. Tellis was explaining the effectiveness of
advertising when he stated, The average sales-toadvertising elasticity is .1. It is higher for new products
than established products, in Europe than the U.S., for
durables than non-durables, and in print than TV. The
advertising-to-sales elasticity is also lower in models that
use disaggregates data and includes advertising
carryover, quality, or promotion.
Leonard M. Lodish was discussing how to determine the
long-term effects of advertising when he stated In cases
where increased TV advertising has a significant impact on
sales during the year of the weight increases, in the
following two years, this sales impact is approximately
doubled. On average, that doubling effect comes from an
increase in buying rate in the test group. If TV advertising
weight increases had no significant impact on sales during
the first year, they had no impact in the two following
years either.
http://www.barb.co.uk
BARB delivers official viewing figures to the people. They
do this by paying commission to a variety of different
media companies to collect this data this data is then used
to determine the UKs 26million TVs adverts. This
research is secondary quantitative as BARB are not
actually conducting this and it is used with a large amount
of numbers. The adverts are determined in one main way,
as the data will show who is watching a certain advert at
any time. Once this is known, they then base the adverts
on the most of a type of people watching so that they are
most likely to purchase the product.
http://www.google.com/analytics/#?modal_active=none
Google Analytics is a free website in which we can view
how many people have visiting a certain website. This also
tells us how many hits our website had and how many
people have actually stayed to view the website. It is a
free service, which has been provided by Google to
calculate these things for us.

http://www.nrs.co.uk
National Readership Survey provides a highly accurate
type of primary quantitative print and digital advertising.
This is done by using the NRS Social Grade this classifies
people into different groups depending on a variety of
different things such as jobs, money & area. It shows how
many people are in a certain group of society and how
society is made of these different people.
Bibliography
Date Accessed: 05/17/16
Gerard J. Tellis (May 23rd 2013) / Gerard J. Tellis (1991), An
Analysis of the Tradeoff Between Advertising and Pricing.
Marketing Science Institute.
Date Accessed 05/17/16
Leonard M. Lodish Lodish, Leonard, Magid M. Abraham,
Jeanne Livelsberger, Beth Lubetkin, Bruce Richardson, and
Mary Ellen Stevens (1995), A Summary of Fifty-five InMarket Experimental Estimates of the Long-Term Effect of
TV Advertising. Marketing Science Institute.