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Public Relations Profession

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Submitted By lewart11
Words 568
Pages 3
Laurie Ewart
J3400
Reflection Paper #1
9/18/13
Secondary Research-Chapter 5 As public relations professional, research would be one of the most important aspects of your career. Research should be your first step before launching a new product or marketing plan. If you fail to do the research first, you risk wasting a great deal of time and money on your project. Researching your target marketing is a huge benefit. Secondary research is essentially a summary of data that has already been collected. If you have a question to answer you can easily access the data and analyze it in order to get the answer you are looking for. This is opposed to primary data, which you would have to conduct new research to get the information you need. While secondary research seems to take much less effort, it still had its advantages and disadvantages. One of the main advantages to secondary research is that it is cost and time effective. Since you will not have to conduct the research you would have very little money and time in simply accessing the data from another source. The amount of time you would save by not conducting research you can now spend on analyzing data or any other areas of your plan that it is needed. Another advantage to secondary research is that you have several different sources that you can utilize to find your data. There are many websites that offer this type of information. One of the largest drawbacks of secondary research is that the results are usually not specific. The somewhat generic results from the studies could make it impossible to find data fro a specific brand. A second problem that could stem from such research is conflicting viewpoints. You may use data on the same topic from separate sources and find that the end results seem to be different. This would leave you with the decision to keep looking for more data or report that there

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