Research methods

Research of research methods

There are many different methods of research, some of them being more applicable to different aspects than others. For example, the first one I will be discussing is Primary and Secondary research.

Primary research refers to research that is done by you, it is done for your precise topic / subject you are researching, it is very good as it does not require any cost because you are creating / doing it yourself, meanwhile is has a good overview of the market you are interested in directly. Meanwhile you have the chance of the questionnaire being either bias, or inaccurate because of the answers you may receive may not be to the highest quality; you may get answers that are jokes or don’t mean anything to your survey ultimately ending up with little to no information required. As shown on “The Media Students books” – Page 245-246

Secondary Research refers to research found by other people, but you can quote / use for your own information. From this, it offers a much quicker and easier way to find information, sparing you the time required to take long surveys required for information. Alongside this it is much higher detail, as people have spent a lot of time finding out the statistics to put out either for free, or for a fee beforehand, which leads me to the negative; the information you may need might cost a lot of money to use and import into your own studies, and alongside this you may find that the information is not relevant totally to your study. Again shown on “The Media Students book” – 188-1 89

Qualitative methods provide results that are usually highly detailed and informative, that give very good information for your study. The pros of this search method is that you can explore the topic in depth, and ultimately find a very informative / detailed response from the public. Alongside this you find that Qualitative research is less expensive than its counterpart Quantitative research, because you don’t need as many participants within the study. On the downside of this, you cannot find how many of your questionnaire participants answered a precise question, meanwhile you can’t generalise your findings making it much harder to explain / narrow down.

Quantitative research is based on quantity of an answer, for example you may find 100 out of 1000 people like the new coke flavoured ice cream, which can then be narrowed down and adjusted to 1/10. From this, it is much easier for people to find out answers to much larger quantities of questions in a much shorter amount of time.  Alongside this the information put out is much easier to interpret allowing you to understand and respond correctly, in comparison to other research methods that may be tricky to understand / interpret. But on the downside, you need a huge number of correspondents in order to successfully get an accurate answer, as only 10 people in a survey is not an accurate representation for something like a college, or a city. It also costs a lot of money, as you need to ensure that the survey is widely available and may cost a lot of money to both print and export to everyone who needs it.

Audience research is the process of using an audience to get an accurate and correct response in order to be able to identify either an issue with the product, or a debate on the products future. A few positive points about this is that you are able to easily get information from the required target market, meanwhile you can use this information to get a response to something like TV ratings, or reviews; which we can see via BARB research which collects detail about a shows rating. But, we can look at how something has gone wrong because of a lack of audience research, if we look back at Coca Cola in 1995, they released a new drink called “New Coca-Cola” which was meant to be able to beat the regular coke, and Pepsi because of the drink being even more sugary. He audience research used 200,000 blind taste tests to find that one half of the participants preferred the new drink over the old two. From this after implementing it into the market, they figured it was a huge mistake as if 50% of the survey preferred the drink, that means only 50% of the general Coke drinkers would prefer it, resulting in a very unpopular / received market, ultimately leading to the drink being taken back of the market.

(www.qualtrics.com/blog/coca-cola-market-research)

Product research is the process of researching products similar to what you are intending to put out into the market. This involves looking at what is currently in the market, what has been in the market in the past and what is going to be in the market in years to come. Through this, you are able to get an understanding of how other products have done in certain scenarios, and finding out whether or they will be successful. There are primarily pros of doing this as you are finding out whether or not your product will be successful in the market.

Market research is a lot like product research, except you are looking at the market as a whole instead of the product, you are looking at how well something is received, if it has been successful, or if it has failed. From this you are able to find a response on how your product will take in either a niche market, or perhaps an oversaturated one. Some pros of this is that people are able to find and estimate how well a product will do, and can find out whether or not it is worth investing in, meanwhile on the downside many markets are always Fluctuating; it is constantly changing in markets like the media industry that have different films being released all the time, and films being released that may or may not be critically acclaimed. A side not of this is that market research can help indicate a products life style, finding out how long it will exist in the market for, and how long it will take for it to become irrelevant. We can use the example of films in the box office, like Avatar being in the box office for 6-8 months in the top 10, so we can identify a film similar to it that takes just as much time / effort will be a success.

In conclusion it seems that the primary research is the best way to go about this, as it is the most direct information required in order to be able to find ut the information required for your media products information.