Utilizing Primary and Secondary Research

The majority of successful companies would affirm that they are market driven. Such organizations express a belief in the value of the marketing concept and the relationship between a market orientation and firm success and profitability. A key component within the marketing concept is marketing research. This is the process of gathering information on the market through primary methods, on our own, and secondary methods, through outside sources. This paper presents a brief overview and analysis of the benefits of primary and secondary marketing research for Circuit City Stores, of which I am an employee. Marketing for Circuit City has been a constant process of changing and developing new sales techniques to help increase sales. Though the methods vary greatly they all have the same intended results, to increase profits within our company. In the computer department, the markup on computers is as low as 3% in some cases. Because of this, we generate most of our profit from attachments such as printer ink, cables, warranty plans, and other accessories. In order to help boost the sales of these accessories along with computers, my manager and I decided to put together bundled packages. These packages include computer, monitor, printer, installations, warranty plan, and many of the required accessories to get it all working in a timely manner. We prominently display one package for each computer on the wall behind it. We have implemented this approximately two months ago but have recently had a steady decline in the number of package sales. The purpose of this research is to find a way to change the signs or the way they are displayed and sold to bring the number of installation sales up significantly utilizing primary and secondary research methods.

Marketing research can be viewed as both a process and outcome of gathering, organizing, and analyzing information concerning the market. Marketing research involves the gathering and analysis of a broad spectrum of market information and intelligence in an effort to enhance organizational decision-making, planning, and marketing plan implementation. Circuit City's primary source of primary research would be looking at and analyzing past sales and look for trends. Such things to look for would be what days the majority of things were sold, how much the average customer spends, how often did the same people return to the store, and how often they purchased accessories. Through our internal systems all of this is automatically tracked and organized in reports which are readily available to our management and marketing team. Some trends that we initially noticed was that Saturday was our highest volume day, but not always the day we sold the most computer packages. We deduced that perhaps the problem did not exist within our signage but with our sales associates not offering and recommending these packages. We also noticed that some customers made small purchases shortly after buying a computer, typically for printer ink, cables, and surge protectors. These are things that are inclusive in our computer packages and the sales associate should already be recommending. Upon further analysis we found certain associates were not selling any packages while other ones did the opposite. Through our own internal investigating we were able to help train and teach these associates better ways to explain these packages to customers and better ways to recommend and offer them to our customers.

Primary marketing research has the major advantage of being designed to address the organization's specific current marketing problem. As a consequence, the primary data generated should be more directly applicable to the organization's information needs. Another major advantage of primary research is the timeliness of the information generated. However, none of these advantages will be utilized unless the primary marketing research is of high quality. Probably the biggest disadvantage of primary marketing research is its cost. When compared to secondary marketing research, the cost of paying employees to help compile the information, the time to retrieve company records to analyze, is much more expensive to do then simply pay an outside company for their information on the same or similar market. Related to the cost concerns are the difficulties associated with actually carrying out the research. A major advantage of secondary marketing research is its lower cost relative to primary marketing research. While some market research reports cost thousands of dollars, there are numerous secondary market research sources which cost considerably less, so that an organization can adjust its secondary marketing research demands to fit the company budget. Another cost-related advantage of secondary market research is that the costs are known and fixed. Primary marketing research, on the other hand, typically involves a range of unknown costs, such as overtime, hiring outside companies to help analyze your information and more. Another advantage of secondary marketing research is that it is already converted into charts, demographics, and organized whereas primary research must be processed prior to understanding and interpreting. The major disadvantage of secondary research is that it was not specifically conducted to address the organization's specific problem or concern. Other disadvantages include a comparative lack of timeliness, relevance, and accuracy.

Another utilization of primary research used to help improve our sales was customer surveys. After every customer makes a purchases, whether it be a $1.99 item or a $9999 television, has a URL at the bottom of the receipt. After going there and typing in the special code, the customer has a 10 question survey to answer regarding their shopping experience. As an incentive to get people to fill it out, they give away a $5000 weekly drawing for people who fill it out. The questions on this survey range from how helpful was the associate, how fast was the tendering of the product, was the product available, and was it easy to find someone to help. It also contains a small blank at the bottom for the customer to fill out anything they want to say about their shopping experience. The code the customer types in from the receipt upon going to the website contains the receipt or ticket number. Through this we can look specifically at who sold them the item, when they sold it, and it also contains the contact information for the customer. Through analysis of this information we can identify problems that exist in associates and in product availability. This feedback from the customers is crucial in finding ways to improve our sales and customer relations. By doing this we learned that our pricing was competitive and fair but inventory of sales items was a problem. We also observed that we sell more computer packages