Secondary Sources of Information

Marketing information must be timely, organised, useful and in a simple form if it is to ease decision making. It should also be easily manipulated to satisfy the changing and ad hoc requirements of management for information. There is more to marketing information than marketing research. Indeed, marketing research is a subsystem of the marketing information system. A Marketing Information System (MIS) is a structure within an organisation designed to gather, process and store data from the organisation 's external and internal environment and to disseminate this in the form of information to the organisation 's marketing decision makers. The activities performed by an MIS and its subsystems include information discovery, collection, interpretation (which may involve validation and filtering), analysis, and intra-company dissemination (storage, transmission, and/or dumping).
Chapter Objectives
The objectives of this chapter are:
• To convince the reader of the benefits of beginning any marketing research with a thorough search of secondary sources of data
• To articulate the advantages of secondary data
• To highlight the potential errors which can be hidden within secondary data
• To outline some of the main internal and external sources of data available to commercial enterprises, and
• To help the reader to recognise the transition, in marketing research, from a dependence upon published sources of secondary data to electronically stored secondary data.
Structure Of The Chapter
At the outset of the chapter a strong case is made for studying secondary data before engaging in primary research. The potential benefits of beginning any study with secondary data are outlined, including the prospect that in some cases possession of relevant secondary data may obviate the need for primary research to be undertaken at all. This discussion is followed by an overview of the questions that should be asked when evaluating secondary sources and data in terms of