Research Tips

Building from Previous Research

Few market research projects explore truly unique issues. Most simply investigate familiar issues (customer satisfaction, service quality, advertising effectiveness, etc.) in a particular context. Consequently, it makes sense to reuse existing information as a foundation for any project. For example, research instruments, such as survey questions or focus group moderator guides, used in previous studies can provide a good starting point for new studies and can sometimes be used with little or no modification. The research instruments being reused can come from the organization’s own previous research or from external sources such as journal articles or books of marketing scales.