market research is a really important topic for National five and higher business management I'm just going to give you a quick overview of field and desk research truly important that companies do carry out market research and and why do they do it well they need to find out what goods and services customers want if they didn't customers would not buy from them they need to find out what prices the customers are willing to pay to find out about competitors what products and services they're offering and other things that they're doing and they also might want to decide to gather some customer feedback about their current products and services in order to try and improve these as I've said market research can be split into two categories here we've got desk research and desk research it's when we look at information that already exists this is gathering secondary information that is already being collected by someone else field research on the other hand is gathering new first-hand information for the business and this has been collected by the business for a specific purpose field research has some advantages here the research is new and up to date which gives accurate information about the current market although the firm that collects the information and data has access to it it's collected for a specific purpose and this makes it really relevant to what the business actually needs the downsides of it though is as expensive to collect you might need to pay people to to do this as their job you might need to train people to be able to do this and this will cost you money it can take a long time to carry out field research and this could lead to decision making taking a lot longer how we can do field research where we have interviews focus groups postal surveys telephone surveys online surveys whole tests and observations and there's a really fantastic page on the BBC Bitesize website that gives you some definitions of these methods with some advantages and disadvantages that I would highly recommend for you research also has some advantages it's quicker than field research and it's normally less expensive than field research too often it can be free especially if it's just a Google search um for some information it's widely available online in newspapers in magazines Etc however because the research hasn't specifically been gathered for your business it might not be relevant to your needs you might not find that the right information that you need the information could be gathered a long time ago and it could be out of date and the information could be biased as well which might make it make you make wrong decisions a few sources of desk research include using newspapers websites government reports like the census sales figures and journals thanks for watching