Marketing Subject Guide — Getting Started

Data for market research is gathered through both primary and secondary research. This guide focuses on secondary sources available at UConn.

• Primary data: is based on research that you conduct yourself using tools such as surveys, polls, focus groups, and interviews. Primary research is used to address a specific problem. While primary data can be more thorough and insightful, it is costly and time consuming to collect such data and conducting such research requires special skills.
• Secondary data: is based on research done by others, such as government agencies, market research firms, and trade associations. Examples of secondary sources include statistics and market research reports. These sources can save you a lot of time but as you have no control over how and what pieces of data were collected, they may not always be specific enough for your needs.

*Some content borrowed from MIT Libraries' Marketing Research Guide.

Library journal research databases allow you to quickly search the content of tens of thousands of academic journals and magazines, going back 20 or more years. Using these sources effectively requires some of the same persistence, curiosity, and attention to detail that good journalism requires. Points to remember:

Library databases do not all behave like Google!

• Be prepared to try multiple searches, experimenting with different combinations of keywords to broaden or narrow your search
• Use the wildcard symbol (usually * ) to force the search to find different forms of the same word. e.g.
  • ethic* will search for "ethics"  "ethical,"  etc.
• Combine synonyms for the same concept in the search with OR on the same line
• Combine the different concepts you want to be searched at the same time with AND on different lines.
• Change default setting to search the entire text of stories to get more results