Research Methods
"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought"
by Albert Szent-Gyergyi (discoverer of vitamin C)
Research is really important for a project, regardless the area that you are working.
For enter in a new project we need to do some search to have a base of information and with that we can proceed with our project, and that research could be divided into three types: audience, market and production.
Audience Research
Studies the type of consumers are going to buy/watch, what type of products/adverts and why that kind of product is going to call their attention and made them buy it and no the product from another brand.
Market Research
Is where we investigate what type of product is going to give more income by searching into the demands of consumers.
"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is, it is what consumers tell each other it is"
by Scott Cook (director of EBay)
Production Research
It's a more technical search, and informs about the production process like the background information, locations, legal requirements, etc...
In the project that we are making right now (advertisement) we use a more academic technical research and this one could be divided in two types: primary and secondary.
Primary Research
In the primary stage we do a research more "personal" and with more controlled information, and could be achieved in different forms like questionnaires, phone interviews or direct observation from the researcher. This research is good when we want answers more "customize" and they can address more specific topics, but doing an investigation like this have disadvantages too because is really expensive, it's a lot or time and work not only for the development of the plan but also for the execution and it's already expected a really low response from the public.
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells it self"
by Peter Drucker (educator, consultant and
author)
In this phrase of Peter Drucker we can see that for the commercial field this step can be a really good way to know if some product is going to succeed or not, who is going to buy, if the target is going to be kids or women, men, more for the teenage side, etc...
Secondary Research
In the secondary stage the search is more "theoretic" then the primary stage. Could use collation and synthesis of existing research and can be collected from research subjects or experiments and source can be newspapers, magazines or collected information from the internet. In the difference of the other method, this is less expensive, can use the already research from the primary stage (in other words it uses less time researching); but the information that we encounter could be inaccurate or not enough specific and could appear a copyright problem if we take information without permission from a website or a magazine and can lead to legal complications.
Inside this stages is another two methods that could help us in the research: qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative Research
The qualitative research collects information through interviews, observation or open-ended questionnaires. It's present in the primary stage of the research and it's useful for studies that have an individual level and find, more in depth, the way that which people think or feel. Since this method give us more information about the "person" this give us more information how to commercialise a product, for example depending on your searches on website of women clothes they could give you more options or sending a specific email to call your attention. Like the primary research, this method could be really expensive and involve a lot of work in only one step, and can be not be receive how it's expected.
Quantitative Research
The quantitative research is focus more on information in "numerical form" that can e put in order. Surveys are an example of quantitative research where you have questions and some answers that you can choose one, after that they divide the answers given by the public and put them in categories. Like that we have "specific" percentages (statistics). In this method the expensive issue could be present too, but the response to the project could be different that the qualitative research because sometimes this surveys can be obligatory, and that makes more easy to recall information.
For my project I used the secondary research method, more specific the internet. Search on YouTube different types of adverts, how they call the attention of their audience, when I finally found the type of target audience I wanted to have and what product I wanted to advertise and start searching old adverts from that brand and how they approach the public. Being a product for kids have to call the attention of the parents too, because they are the ones going to buy the products for their children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVGRGtAcPtg).
