In this article, we are going to argue the definition of secondary data and conduct the secondary data analysis.
What is secondary data?
The world practice of the last decades has shown that electronic information has become the most important component of the modern market infrastructure. Free access to economic and social information is considered as one of the basic conditions for the effective functioning of a market economy in transition.
Marketing information is essential for marketing research, strategy development, and making the necessary management decisions. To facilitate and unify research, marketing information is divided into primary and secondary.
Secondary data is a set of data existing at the enterprise, publications of government agencies, specialized commercial and periodicals, and books, as well as information previously collected for other purposes. In other words, it is a kind of data, that has already been collected (and sometimes partially processed and systematized) by others and for other purposes, exists in a published form, but is suitable for use to achieve the goal set by the firm in a particular situation. Secondary data help the researcher to get acquainted with the situation in the industry, with the trends of changes in sales and profits, competitors, the latest advances in science and technology.
Secondary data has certain advantages:
- relatively inexpensive, fast to assemble;
- sources of information may have data that the firm itself cannot obtain (government);
- quite reliable helps to get a more comprehensive view of the issues under consideration.
Kinds of Secondary data
Virtually all managers use secondary information to make management decisions. This type of information in turn is divided into internal and external secondary information.
Internal information is data that is collected and analyzed at the enterprise and recorded in the form of accounting and statistical reports, reports on the volume of purchases and sales, operational and current production, and scientific and technical information.
External information is published information about the state of the external environment of the enterprise (about the market and its infrastructure, the behavior of buyers and suppliers, the actions of competitors, measures of state regulation of market mechanisms).
Sources of marketing information
Among the most important types of sources of secondary marketing information are:
- internal sources of the company: periodic reports of specialized groups of employees and departments, current information reports of departments;
- published sources: reports of government agencies, reports of trade associations, stock exchange reports, statistical reports, scientific publications, trade journals, press releases, directories, analytical reviews, general publications;
- other sources: suppliers, customers, consumers, competitors, intermediaries, inventors and innovators, advertising agencies, the media. A special mention should be made of the non-traditional global computer information network Internet, which will undoubtedly be one of the first used sources of information in the near future;
- information industry: firms engaged in monitoring, auditing, consulting, marketing research, other specialized agencies, such as newspaper clipping service, advertising verification service, credit service, etc.
Primary information carriers are books (textbooks, manuals, monographs), periodicals (journals, scientific collections), optical CDs (CD-ROM), as well as unpublished materials: deposited manuscripts, dissertations, scientific reports, conference materials, reports on various areas of research, etc.