 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's member exclusive webinar, Driving Value from Desk Research. This is the second member exclusive webinar as we enter the business end of 2020. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items just so you know how to participate and get the most out of your participation today. The presentation will last for approximately 45 minutes. You'll be able to send text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the chat box of the control panel. You may send in these questions at any time during the presentation and we'll collect an address as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. Whilst we don't send slides of the presentation after the webinar, the webinar itself will be available to watch via content hub exchange within the next couple of working days. The address is exchange.cim.co.uk. All of our webinars are stored there. All right now, with all that done, it's my pleasure to now hand over to Gene Suthin, who will be today's presenter over to you Gene. Okay, good morning and welcome everybody who is listening into this webinar. I'm going to talk you through a hobby horse of mine, which is how to be efficient and effective in finding existing information. A little bit of an introduction first of all. I've worked at CIM for over 20 years, but in fact my real job is running a market research company. That's a market research company that does consultancy projects on all kinds of different businesses and sectors. When I run courses, they are normally on market research, desk research, customer satisfaction, customer experience, all really based on information, information about customers most often, but information about customers and markets. And so if you have responsibility for any other areas of marketing like strategy or planning or communications, you still ideally need information and context in order to develop your plans and in order to analyze the market. Most of my work is in B2B rather than consumer product and in some ways that can be more difficult to find existing information. But I will be covering today both B2B like materials, machinery, components, B2C, food, drink, tobacco, furniture, whatever, and also professional services, so finance, software, publishing, recruitment, all of those are areas that I've done a lot of projects in. I'll be relating both to UK and to international markets and so what I am saying will refer to whether you are looking at information on your home market, wherever that might be, or whether you are looking for information on a foreign market. What we're going to cover is really four key topics. The first thing is to understand when desk work works or when desk work is a good idea because a lot of your colleagues and bosses may say we need information on this, just find it online and they expect you to search around and find it. There are certain kinds of information you are not going to find online no matter how long you look and so you have to be realistic about what is practical and not practical to do. The second thing is to give you a few hints and tips about using Google rather than just putting a word into a Google search engine and hoping on page one, three or five to find what you're looking for, we're going to talk about how we can use Google a little bit more efficiently. And then thirdly I am going to suggest a number of types of resource you might look for. In the olden days when I first started doing desk research we used especially libraries and libraries had different areas of the library, this area here for reports and that area there for statistics and this area here for publications and trade journals, this area here for directories. But now it's all out there somewhere on the internet and people are not looking so specifically so I'm going to suggest 10 types of information you should be looking for which will be again more productive in yielding what you're looking for. And finally I often get asked I've collected all this stuff now what am I supposed to do with it and I will talk a little bit about how to pull it together at the end. So that's quite a lot of topics and I'm going to talk quite fast but you can always listen to this webinar again and go through some of the website links that I include on the slides and so on. I want you to think a little bit about your own business area now that might be food and drink that might be machinery and components it might be finance and software whatever so think about real products. I'm going to take one product as a main example today just because it's a really interesting hot topic right now which is to do with plastics and plastics recycling and I think it's something we all have a vague interest in and it's just easier to give examples if I use some real world product or market. So first of all let's talk a little bit about what desk research is. Desk research means using existing information it exists somewhere it may not be on the internet it may be in a library it may be in the office of somebody else it may be a trade association it may be in a government department the point is that you are not doing primary research you are not talking to people to interview them to get feedback that is primary research so you're not collecting it for yourself you're collecting information that already exists so we call it desk research you can do it from your desk or secondary information because it is second hand but importantly when you are doing desk research whether it's desk or primary importantly you still need to work to an objective and that's one really important takeaway from today if I can say that and very often again you get asked for information could you see what you could find for me about x for Friday see what you can find is a really bad request for information you can say yes of course I'd be happy to look but tell me exactly what you need to know so before you start doing desk research on any topic make a list of the key information you are looking for otherwise you can continue for the next 15 days looking for information and how are you going to know that you're done you could go on an infant item of you know 20 000 pages on this topic so in the beginning make very clear what is your objective why are you looking for this what information are you looking for and make that list if some of it can't be found that maybe it needs primary research but we need to know what we are looking for and secondly set yourself a time scale if I'm doing research for a client I often say if I can't find it within two days of online looking it probably doesn't exist now of course on some studies I can do a 10 day desk research exercise but that might mean I'm looking at five countries or 10 different products or whatever it might be but don't go on an infant item if you look systematically then within a couple of hours and certainly a couple of days you should be able to find most of what exists so besides that key message of working to an objective the other important takeaway is threefold one is be specific so know exactly what you are looking for and why don't look for anything I say look for something secondly be systematic so in the beginning have a list of 10 or 12 key types of resource you're going to look for and I'm going to give you examples later and thirdly the end part of our talk today be selective don't feel just because you collected all this information you've got to put it in your report somewhere because if you wrote your list of key information the beginning then that is the information to include you can discard lots of information it can be irrelevant it can be out of date it can be biased it can be simply incorrect so be selective in what you include in your presentation or your report okay so let's talk about why we use desk research desk research is really useful at every stage of a market research project or every stage of even developing strategy first of all in the beginning if you do some I call it the homework if you do some homework find some information online it builds your confidence ah now I understand what this is all about now I understand what that terminology means and you have a better grasp of the topic in the first place and then you um when you're getting feedback from other people you might talk to some customers or some very informed parties or you might talk to a trade association you can then put into perspective what they have told you so if somebody says to you I buy my uh fruit juice from the number one supermarket in britain waitrose you look up online you say oh well actually an analysis of a grocery retail in the uk in the last year was saying tesco were the number one supermarket and it allowed you to put into perspective what have people said and are they giving an opinion or giving a fact thirdly when you're briefing your colleagues or anybody else who might work on the project you'll have some material to give to them again in the olden days as I keep referring back to we would have handed them lots of photocopies of articles statistics newspaper reports and so on before they start doing their interviews so they feel really comfortable with the topic before they talk to people sometimes you need to pick a sample of who to talk to now in um consumer markets you very often are looking for a representative sample a sample that is representative of a particular population in a b2b market you're very often looking for a very suitable appropriate handpicked sample so if I said to you would you please call five of the top 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers in the uk you need to find out well who are the top 20 and so desk research will help you do that so planning your sample and selecting the target respondents can be helped through online research when you design a questionnaire sometimes people ask me to design a questionnaire for them and I say I can't just sit down and do it I need to know what are the objectives what kind of questionnaire is this is it for a focus group or is it for online survey is it for a telephone interview I need to know who you're talking to is it a cio or is it a project engineer and then I need to know what kind of questions to ask and to know the kind of questions to ask I need to know what is going on in our market whatever that market might be so I need to do some background reading to understand are things going digital in that market is the new material being introduced are most people dropping the use of this kind of software whatever it might be I need that by way of background so then I can say to my respondent I have read this is that true in your company so questionnaire design and checking questionnaires is helped by having the right terminology the right background in the market getting the interview set up if you're calling someone to arrange an appointment it's so much easier if you sound like you know what you are talking about I have read recently there has been a takeover in this market of abc by xyz do you think that will affect your demand for this product in the future do you think this will affect your sourcing but at least I am talking about what is already going on in that market so as I said before not just briefing the people in the beginning but briefing the interviewers and later on when I'm analyzing my data even if it is an online survey even if I've got very mechanistic approach to the analysis I still can put the context in by putting in a table or putting in a chart or putting in some references to recent reports in my report so at the end of the day personally even if I am doing a fieldwork study where I am talking to respondents I personally would always do some desk research to have that understanding that context and most importantly to feel comfortable and confident when I'm presenting the findings in the end what's desk research good for so when your colleague says just find it online yeah you can usually find a broad overview of a market you can understand the market context you know the relative size of the market the key players in the market have some idea about who's who and who the major users might be you can get an idea of the different terminology that is used in the market and probably you can find something about the direction a market is going not necessarily in terms of forecast although yes sometimes forecast but even in terms of trends and new product introduction and so on and very often of course you are being asked to profile competitors to write a company profile and again there are at least 10 different types of source you might use if you were trying to profile any one particular customer competitor or supplier so desk research is good for factual information of that type what it's less good for and you may not be able to find is more about the attitudes and opinions you can find who could I sell to what products are out there is the market growing what is the legislation who are the major suppliers sometimes we get price levels that's not always easy but we often can get some kind of indicative prices what distribution channels exist how does this product get from manufacturer to end user and a little bit about communications promotion events and so on so that's good by way of understanding a market and understanding the context but very often we want other questions answered something like how to launch a new product how will customers react to my proposition why is my business falling away what do customers really want are they satisfied with our supply right now how should I reach them by way of communication what should the message be so there are a lot of questions that actually are much better answered by your customers your prospects or your past customers so differentiate between what desk research can and cannot do the attitudes opinions expectations of your customers or prospects better to talk to them primary research but existing information facts about the market who is who what is available what direction of the mark going gap kind of context and background desk research is excellent for so as I said the most important is not to look for just anything but actually to have in mind a particular list of information often you would be asked how big is this market who are the major players what kind of barriers exist tell me about the legislation can you get some idea of prices how should we reach this market should we use social media should we be using a trade show what about trade journal advertising what is going to prompt a change in this market what are the key market drivers how are things looking is there an opportunity for us so those are the kind of questions you might be asked and the kind of questions which desk research should be able to answer so that's part one is really understanding be realistic about what desk research can and cannot do don't be overly ambitious but certainly be very specific and set your objective from the beginning because otherwise it's like saying i'm hungry i'm going out to buy food and you go to a supermarket you take a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of the other and you come home and you say oh i didn't buy any fruit oh i didn't get any meat because it wasn't on your list so don't look generally look specifically okay let's move on now and talk a little bit about using google because everybody who searches online uses google i hope a few of you out there might use other search engines also we can't escape the fact that actually google has over 90 percent of search around the world so we we accept it is the dominant search engine but the important point is that every search engine uses a different elogatron this means it would freeze different things according to how it's set up therefore if you search using yahoo or bing you actually will come up with some different materials than if you use google alone and there are search engines called meta search engines which actually combine the findings of a number of the search engines that are out there if you were in russia for example yandex would be a lot more productive for you than let's say google dot dot go has a very small market share but is very effective in doing what you might call private searches or searches that are not traced afterwards so use a combination of search engines for more effective finds if you do use google then you could read some articles about how you how to use google more effectively i know google themselves have those online but there are a few general guidelines first of all if you are looking for information about a different market let's say germany or china or japan wherever use the local version of google don't use google dot co dot uk or google dot com so you might use google dot de if you're searching for information about the german market you also can change the language that you are searching in if you go to google and you go to advanced search then you can go under there and search using a different language essentially choosing the language from which you are searching you also can choose the country you want to search in and if you go to tools you can choose the year or the date you can say i only want what is available there in the last week in the last month in the last year so you can search anytime or you can search past year personally i limited to the past year because from for desk research purposes i don't want stuff that's three years old and five years old maybe sometimes you deliberately do but most of the time i want recent information so under settings you can go to languages and choose countries and languages and then of course you can install google translate on your search bar at the top and so even if you search an example i use as i was doing something on vineyards in italy a year ago and when i searched something like italian wine market i came up with lots of articles about what the top 10 wines are in italy that's not what i wanted to know but when i actually translated it into italian and searched on google.it i came up with much more interesting local italian documents reports from the industry out there statistics on the industry and so on and of course i could very easily use google translate to translate that data if it's a pdf you still can tell from looking at it that looks like an interesting table and then copy and paste and use google translate so use the local search engine and use google translate limit the time period you're searching in and set your settings to the country you're targeting as well as that consider other parts of google for example sometimes you only want news items so search google news and very often google images can be quite useful when you're looking to compare the design of something we were looking just yesterday at something and we looked at actually we were looking at a customer journey map but we looked at images because under images i had a client recently in ukraine who was looking at the furniture market in germany and if you look at google images under google.de not only do you see the different pictures but under the picture you will see the website they took that picture from and therefore you can go to the website and see is that a furniture shop is that a furniture manufacturer is that a furniture trade fair wherever they may have taken the the picture from so google images can be quite useful google scholar is very useful for academic papers so very often you will find people for their masters or their phd will have done a study on some esoteric topic that you're trying to find information on but actually they may have done a market review as part of that so look at google scholar there are other websites on the slide there that you can go to afterwards like dogpile is a meta search engine like i mentioned where they add together google yahoo bing and yandex there's a very good blog about search skills at search research one.logspot.co.uk so have a look at those when you find time and try and improve your efficiency in search you may also know that if you search for something in google like plastics and you put plastics.pdf you will find reports papers documents if you search plastics.ppt you will come up with presentations if you search plastics.xlx you'll come up with data so search by the file format when you're using google and you can restrict it to specific data as i mentioned having refined your google search more specifically then if you are looking at other countries as i said even if you don't have the local language you can change the search tool to the local country and use google translate to translate even even what you find what the google return finds even if it is in a different language you can then use google translate to translate the whole page i'm just looking here in front of me on my other computer i did a test again this morning about the bercato del vino italia the wine market in italy and all the documents that it comes up with are italian documents and that's much more relevant than finding people who happen to have written a report in the uk or us in english on my topic you search local search engines the other thing is to think a little bit about what other countries are interested in that country so if i were looking at germany i'm not only looking at uk information german information but what other countries export to germany so i might look at american information us or i might look at google.com or i might look at dutch information because they export to germany so look at third party sources other countries with an interest in your target market and then you're looking for international bodies international trade associations international magazines international trade fairs and so on so that's talking about using google and just being a little bit more refined rather than putting words into google.co.uk or google in english and hoping to find what you are looking for so we said in part one be very specific about what you're looking for be systematic about what you're looking for and be realistic about what you will and won't find in part two just now we've talked about how to use google more effectively now i'm going to quite quickly go through 10 different types of source that you might look for and i'm using plastics as an example here just because it happens that i did a job in plastics and recycling of plastics actually i saw it was back in 2017 but when i looked at my file i found 111 documents of relevance to the recycling of plastics in europe and from those i was able to compile the report for my client which had a very specific objective so the first thing to do is to be very clear and what exactly is it we are talking about do you know what plastics are do you know what plastics mean do you know what other terminology you can use so define the topic and you can define it by using the standard industrial classification or an SITC the SITC or even by looking on google search and then seeing what else comes up because they often say other search terms used are so for me i was looking at things like plastics recycling waste management packaging sustainability and of course even within plastics i was looking at PET polyethylene polypropylene and other polymers and so on so look and see what are the buzz words as i call them what are the key words you are going to use when you are looking for sources of information the next thing to look at is to see can we find some statistics now these statistics may be local national statistics or international so the SIC the standard industrial classification code 20.16 is manufacture of plastics but on the other hand 38.92 is the recycling side of the recovery of sorted materials and there are other related codes like prodcom codes if you're looking at EU data or euro start and you know even still if you're looking at any of the countries in Europe you will be looking at EU data historically and going forward and i know from recent delegates on a course that people think you cannot find statistics relating to professional services that's not in fact true there is data relating to trade and servers like IT or telecoms and so on and again if you look at euro start definitions you will see how they deal with production and trade of professional services when we talk about production we mean sales effectively there for trade and we're looking at the trade tariff i usually tell companies to find out from their own company what reference number is used when their product is exported so for example in this case when i'm looking at recycled plastics 3915 is waste pairings and scrap of plastics and so it's chapter 39 of the standard industrial trade classification if you have any problems call the national statistics office there are usually very helpful helplines there the ONS down in Wales are always really friendly i think they're quite pleased when someone actually takes some interest in all the data they're churning out and they usually will guide you where to find the information or even send it to you if it's not actually published online and likewise in other countries you'd have the national statistics office like Titus at Bundesamt in Germany and every country has its own NAT stats office as i call it and there is actually there is a UN website that lists the national statistics office for every country in the world to find the national statistics office and then think what other organizations might be looking at production or trade and that might be OECD United Nations Eurostat and so on so one resource is statistics the next thing we're looking at is government bodies which government department is responsible for this in the case of plastics will be the business energy industry and strategy industrial strategy they changed the name of that every government but right now it's the BEIS i think and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs is also concerned about recycling in Germany the GTAI Germany trade and invest is the government department responsible for attracting investment to Germany now if you were interested in the food industry in Germany the motor industry in Germany or plastics industry in Germany you could contact GTAI because it is their job to give you a profile to tell you how is that particularly the street structured in Germany today and there are lots of other into that they're not just for Germany every country has a an investment an inward investment government department most countries have a department for international trade most countries have a department for industry now i'm not saying the other ones don't i'm saying very often they are combined like industry and trade or industry and investment or whatever it might be and then there are whole lists of intergovernmental organizations who also issue reports on important sectors important sectors like food and fertilizer and automotive and textile and industries of that kind and you will find EU reports world bank reports the ITU is the international telecoms union uh UN uh United Nations and so on now again the reason i just planting random list of this kind is because once you know such a report might exist you can go looking for it but if you didn't even think in those terms it might not come up on page one or page two or page three of the search so look specifically for government reports look specifically for government statistics here are examples of two reports one the one on the left is a report on plastics the european strategy for plastics and that's produced by the european commission and was published i think last year and then the second one was as it happens because i was doing a lot of work recently on germany and the second one was published by invest in germany and it's a profile of the food industry and if you look at those blue links down the side you can see it links you through to a lot of other information but let me go back to slide 20 where we were talking about different types of senses of expertise that you might relate to so very often there is a trade association for a particular product area like the british plastics federation there may be a research institute like the motor industry research association there may be a university that specializes in a particular team or topic there might be a library here in london i would always use the british library and of course you have access to the cim library and the cim knowledge services to ask for assistance in looking for information very often leading companies may publish a market study or a report or an overview so an organization like yara which is a fertilizer manufacturer they produce the fertilizer industry yearbook and they produce statistics of supply and demand broken down by region and even if you might worry about oh that came from a company it may not necessarily be objective well we can see from the tables they supply giving market shares of major suppliers that their data came from the ifa so now i understand the international fertilizer association exists so we can look for who are major players in particular markets and see if they are sharing white papers market reports or background studies many of the management consultancies specialize in particular sectors like deloitte is very good on retail kpmg pwc bain mckinsey any of those um consultancies if you go to their website and look at their sector specializations they may produce annual reports on the top of specific relevance to you and as i mentioned there you may you do as as members of the cim you have access to cim knowledge services and if you go to my cim on the cim website and you access under resources and the marketing library you have access to ebsco on there ebsco gives you access to a lot of newspaper articles magazine or journal articles and reports from market line and market line reports they very often do swat analysis of major international companies so if you search for a company name let's say like yara and you put yara swat ebsco will come up with a 10 12 or 70 page report on that particular company so make sure that you're using the resources that you have access to as a member of cim and you know the sort of queries that the the cim knowledge services cannot help with i was speaking to dawn during the week and she said they were asked recently about information about gps systems for use indoors in warehouses and hospitals or looking at the uses and applications for seaweed for example in cosmetics or food or agriculture or some guidance on a sampling frame for example to reflect a particular population they might use you know no mistake on labour market or something for that so obviously you should look for the information yourself but then see if you can get assistance through your cim membership here is an example of a report on the pet market produced by the plastics recyclers europe which is one of the trade associations which is available free of charge on a consultant's website the consultants are called euro your your omia urm i a on their website you will find this particular report and they are just making it available for people on the website they also have a review of carpet waste products in the uk because that uses a lot of plastics but polyethylene and so on so um you will find consultancies are very often sharing information market research companies very often share a certain amount of information like ugov if you go to ugov.co.uk you get quite interesting consumer market information by way of desk research by way of context and here's another report on the right from pwc the accountancy or consultancy firm and it's on plastics in the circular economy so not surprising that i could locate 111 different reports on plastics plastics recycling plastics in europe what i did was to take 10 different types of source and find four or five examples within each you can find a trade magazine a publication or even a portal most industry sectors have a magazine for that industry it could be a local a uk or us magazine or an international european or international magazine don't just look at the magazine see who wrote the article call up the journalist email the journalist and say that was a really interesting article can you suggest where i can look for further information the same publication very often organizes a conference or a trade show or they may issue an annual report in january the year in review or something of that kind and actually even advertisements in magazines can be quite useful to understand the product offering of a company or even job vacancy ads not just in a magazine but job sites can be interesting to see this company is going to open up a new regional sales office in berlin or whatever it might be and you can gather useful information from there so there are lots uh on the next slide here i'm showing there are just examples of half a dozen or 10 slides all of which are relevant to plastics and recycling looking at local uk international and um other country level and here are two examples the one on the left is called just food it's a portal which is particularly good for the food industry there's another one i think called just drink and on the right hand side we've got plast europe which is kind of like a portal where it gathers information from all the different sources in europe on the plastics industry so again you won't find that unless you are looking specifically for a plastics trade journal or a plastics forum or whatever resource you have specified most industries have a trade fair or event that's particularly relevant and so look in a directory of trade fairs or a listing a calendar of events you can look at particular places like if you looked at somewhere like hanover you would find all the trade fairs that are going to be run there this year if you look at the nec you will see that there's a packaging trade fair due to be held there and you can see there's one also here um on um on integrated packaging and so on so make sure you have the right um uh topics and within the trade fair when you go and look at who is exhibiting it's helpful to you in terms of major players when you click on the company name it gives you many profiles of the company and of course very often in a mini profile they say at this trade fair we are planning to launch our new xyz machine and so it's telling you a little bit about their latest products their innovations and so on so trade fair information or other events like conferences conferences are really useful because you can find out who the speakers are and then find an expert in a particular topic here's a particular event called let's recycle live it's going to be in a local it's a local event um and it's actually next year and so again we can contact them and find a list of potential speakers they say they're going to have more than a hundred speakers if I was looking for someone either to speak at one of my events or to interview as part of research on a topic I might be able to identify a speaker in that way just a few more ideas here at most industries also there will be market reports and you will say yes but they cost us $5,000 and we can't afford that kind of budget that is why we are doing the desk research I understand but it's still helpful to identify who has published the research what companies did they profile in that report can you contact the person who wrote that report there are a number of report directories I'm sure you have found them already online but one is called marketresearch.com and the other is called researchandmarket.com and there's six or ten other ones and if you do a search in there on your topic you can then narrow it down by country but then look at the table of contents and look at the companies that are mentioned in there find the data was produced and look for online reviews if you take the name of the report this one here was a consultancy called AMI who published a report on rigid plastic packaging if we put the title of that report into a search engine we may find that a plastics magazine has written a review of the report and in that review they may give some forecast figures some market size figures or some market data so look for the publisher look inside the report and then see can we find any coverage of that report and most industries have two or three consultancies that are particularly good in their industry and for example in technology most people would know Gartner IDC Forrester in consumer markets Mintel and Euro monitor publish international reports market line are particularly good on SWOT analysis of companies and you can get those through EBSCO and then many companies themselves subscribe to online databases and the British Library if you happen to be based in London the British Library on the third floor in the business information section they have online access to a number of useful databases that one can consult free of charge so we're just going to zoom through the last few slides because I'm conscious that way I want to give you time for questions so let's look at these looking at social media coverage social media coverage is not only for consumer products and increasingly B2B or industrial products do have social media sites looking at LinkedIn you can find who is responsible for market development in the fertilizer company of Yara or Dupont or whoever it might be and looking at Twitter you can see not only what is being tweeted but who are they following so what are the organizations might be relevant to look at and also who is following them so what are organizations are interested in this topic likewise companies are very often now doing Vimeo or YouTube demos of their product or profiles of their companies and I don't discount Pinterest it's not just for looking at recipes and wedding dresses and so on and I was doing something on railway carriages for a company in I think it was in Estonia and because railways are such a buff kind of area there were lots of Pinterest boards with pictures of lots of railway engines and railway carriages but what was more interesting to me was where did those pictures come from and I could trace back to the publications the annual reports the company websites that they had come from so don't forget to use these but use them in an intelligent way knowing what you are looking for and following up look for a directory specifically and very often countries have the top 100 companies in that country very often industries have the top 100 companies in that industry so the one I'm showing you there is the global 100 software leaders by revenue so again these are often published by the trade association or by the trade journal so look for something don't look for anything so if you just put something like bicycle suppliers you will find advertisements for bike companies all over the place that's not a very useful search but if you look at something like the bicycle trade association or bicycle trade directory or directory of bicycle shops Germany then you are looking for something very specific a directory and you have a much better chance of finding a very specific listing so throughout these sources what I'm encouraging you to do is to look for a very specific type of resource not forgetting that we want to look to the future as well as the past I would encourage you to look at some of the trend watching websites like trendwatching.com jwtintelligence.com or trendhunter.com and particularly if we're looking at trends in areas like fashion, retail, food, lifestyle, living, housing those sort of areas and you will find very useful reports on latest developments in those areas and particularly when it comes to design or service development and sign up for newsletters and updates I get updates weekly from these trend watching websites to keep me abreast in specific areas especially when I'm doing a report on a particular topic I will sign up for information so on the right hand side of the bottom you've got top 100 retail trends then on the top right you've got the trade association wrap with a plastics markets situation report and looking to the future the future 120 are on the top left and then five trends for 2020 so look at those websites and see if you can look at the topic of relevance to you so what I've been trying to suggest I'm going to finish down the next three minutes what I'm going to suggest here is that when you are doing desk research first you make a list of the type of source you're looking for a journal a directory a report, statistics, trade event, social media whatever it is then think where can I find those not just online but through conferences or libraries or banks or commercial publishers even contacting competitors for their annual report and so on and if I'm doing a study which is looking sometimes when I'm running training in a foreign country I might have people from eight different types of company attending so I might be looking at food, furniture, plastics, energy, prefabricated housing and software so I will put those across the top of a spreadsheet and down the left hand side I will put 12 sources like government department, trade journals, statistics, directories and then for each of those sectors I will look for an example of that type of source and that is how to go about it systematically if I have done that and I have not found what I'm looking for it's very likely it does not exist so finally we've talked about being specific about what you are looking for and being aware of what desk research is good and is not good for we've talked about using a search engine more efficiently and more effectively and considering using meta search engines and now we've been giving examples of different type of source you can draw on so we aren't searching randomly for plastics but we're looking at plastics trade show, plastics market report, plastics directory, plastics trends whatever it is we're looking very specifically and then we're coming to the end now where we've gathered a hundred different documents it was like oh how do I pull this together in a 10 page report for my client and that becomes very easy if you do what I said at the beginning and that is be clear on what you promised you would deliver your colleague or your boss or your client they don't want 100 reports they want the key information that you said you would collect so be clear in advance I said I would tell you market size, major players, market trends and key developments in this market if that's what you said you will find pull that information out and don't be shy about listing the resources you drew on to gather together I would always list the resources A because I might want to go back and do a study on the same thing three years later and B because from the client or colleague point of view they can go and look for themselves if they want to and look for further information sometimes my clients will want a file of all the material I've gathered and that's great too that's not a problem so what to do with the information don't feel you have to use it just because you collected it do decide in advance what do I need to know and make use of that under the key headings and sometimes it requires a quick phone call to ask people for further information so don't be afraid to pick up the phone so very often it will give you ideas of people you can contact people you can interview where to look for further information and ideally what you're looking for is an insider an expert throughout all your desk research what you really want is the man who knows because half an hour with that person can write your report for you so see if you can find an expert on your topic so finishing up now be clear on what you're looking for be systematic in your search keep a record of useful websites be selective in what you use and sign up for updates and alerts sometimes you can use a different email address just for all your desk research information so it's not flooding your mail your email and I suppose to sum all that up what I'm saying is don't just randomly search look for something specific make your shopping list from the beginning so I'm sorry I've gone a bit over time on that I hope it's given you enough guidance to experiment a little bit in the desk research you're undertaking and if you have a few questions now Adam will share those with me yes Steve thank you very much for that engaging presentation it's an important but sadly often neglected part of marketing and business and though we did have some technical issues I will say this to make your head a little bit bigger I suppose someone has called you a treasure trove of information and a lot of people have really enjoyed it and I must admit I've been sitting here open mouthed just how much knowledge you have on the subject so thank you very much I'd better get on to the questions bit now we'll add a little bit of time on the end for the time we lost please stay here because we're now going to have some questions for you Jean this is a whole bit as a reminder yeah to all those listening you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the attendee control panel we will try to get through as many as we can and our first questions they're kind of related actually research by nature should be unbiased but obviously we all have our own prejudices we fall into and how do you check the accuracy and authenticity of the online data cross-referencing sources etc and how do you encounter and sort of hide your own biases okay I think that when we look for information we all have a hypothesis we all have something in mind that we are looking for we can't escape that I think what you really need is a healthy degree of skepticism to start with sometimes it just seems too wonderful that this particular market reporter is there and that's exactly what you were looking for and you just have to be sensible about it who wrote the report how was it done there are a lot of reports that you find on that research in markets and market research dot com that are done wholly through desk research and from a foreign market and you know some overseas countries are particularly good on desk research but sometimes they are so far removed from the target market they are studying that they don't really grasp the essence of it so I want to know who has published that report or that information I want to know when it was done importantly I want to know how it was done did they actually interview any companies or are they using existing information and I suppose I very often would be looking for and corroboration of what I found so it has to be consistent with other material I have found and sometimes that is when I will make a phone call and say to someone I've had a look at this I see you report a market of 1056 most reports have suggested a closer to 600 can we clarify what definitions you were using so it very often there is a good explanation of how the data was collected how they defined it when it was done and I just want to know that I've done my best to make sure that it's realistic and accurate and as I mentioned earlier I will refer the client to my source so I will often say and Mintel is a very trustworthy and valid source of information but I will say a Mintel report in 2020 suggested that the size of the market was X and therefore if we have issue with that we will go back and talk to the researchers there so whoever the publisher is I need to be able to actually relate it back to them that's the best I can say is don't believe it just because it's written that you have a healthy skepticism as you said that's right can desk research be easily narrowed down to data that is region specific e.g. county specific town specific something even smaller than that and in some cases it can but the most important is to start with your base data there certainly will be national statistics down to town and county level and so on obviously this depends on specific examples specific countries and but sometimes sometimes we do have to use some of our own intelligence and I remember back in my very first job with the irish trade board when I was looking at the squash market a squash racket market here in the UK and I said something like there is no data relating to the size of the squash racket market in the UK and my boss said to me the client doesn't want to know there is no data they're paying us to get the data for them and he taught me very accurately or very well or very in great detail how to estimate based on the statistics I have so he said how many suppliers are there what's the market share of those suppliers so the biggest supplier how much do they sell so how many people play squash how long does the racket last how many does that shop sell he asked me maybe 12 15 20 questions I knew the answers to all those questions and in the end he said so probably it's at most and I'm inventing here I don't remember four million and I said yeah I certainly wouldn't be more than that because there are only three million players or something like that and he'd say and so it's probably at a minimum two million and I'd say well yes because this company produced 10 million and I know they're exporting 50% or whatever so we had information to validate our estimate and that's still okay so you know going back to the base question we may only have bits and pieces of information but then we can estimate and say to the client or the colleague given that Hampshire is one of the biggest counties in the UK and given that it accounts for x percent of the population if sales of trees were in proportion to the county then sales would be ABC but if in fact they are lower it would be XYZ and if in fact they were higher it would be PQR so you give boundaries but until we give those boundaries we have nothing to go on to start with all the bits of the jigsaw it's really fun you put together all the little bits you you find and you say okay so what is this telling us roughly speaking and it doesn't really matter if it's 35 or 36 it's just saying about how much that's perfect just drawing a conclusion from the data you have I suppose that kind of leads on to my next question though what's your view on paid market research reports okay I'll come to that yes paid market research report there are a lot of great reports out there and very often my client says can't we just buy one in off the shelf and some of them are really good and I'm not going to mention names here we've mentioned a number of them already in the presentation some of them are very professional very accurate very reliable and well worth the money because even if they cost seven and a half thousand pounds actually it's probably more than 15 days of your time and it's probably worth the time but some of them are very second rate unreliable and not worthwhile so my one comment about paid reports is never buy it off the shelf what I mean by that is you talk to the publisher you ask them if they can give you a sample page a sample chapter you make sure you have a table of contents they might even send you a three-year-old version of the report you see if there is anywhere you can take a look at it I have an example where I was looking at a report for a client and I went easy being in London I went into the publisher here in London to take it just a look see at it you know you're not photographic to be able to absorb it but you can just see is this the kind of information my client wants but personally I have never bought a report site unseen and you know it's it's very definitely buyer beware if you write a shopping list of the information you definitely want to find in that report and you do buy the reporter is not in it then at least you have some grounds going back and say ah but you suggested that was in the report I remember just quickly by way of example I was looking at something which I have to do with something like something like the paint market in Europe or something and this market report was looking at the DIY marketer was supposed to have it figures about market shares of the major suppliers and for France and Germany and Italy it had a table giving the market share the turnover of that company and the number of employees or something but for another country I can't remember which country now but let's just say the Netherlands it said there are four main suppliers in the Netherlands these are ABCD so that wasn't exactly what I was wanting I was wanting a table with a market share data and size of company so I just say be very clear on what you're expecting in the report and don't buy it without exploring it further I feel quite sure that's all right these interesting things draw out the data you've already said I think we have time for one more question Jean and I think I know your answer to this one to be honest based on the on talking with you but it's what happens if you have a tight deadline is there a shortcut to desk research okay before I answer that question can I just put in one other comment that I really meant to feed in at some stage through this because a lot of people when they start a bit of desk research they go to Wikipedia and I just want to say if you use Wikipedia which is a big no-no for me but if you do make sure you go back to source you look at the bottom of the page and if they say these are the main suppliers of x you go back to the bottom and see where did they get that listing from so always go back as far as possible to source on your source of information and going back to your final question about being short of time which we are always short of time the first thing I would do is to decide how long I'm going to take whether it's going to be 10 minutes an hour or a day so decide that in advance and quite honestly if you give me any topic right now within 10 minutes I will come up with 15 useful resources that will probably address whatever it is you asked me by simply saying who's the trade association for that let me find a trade magazine I wonder if there's an online forum let me just check if there are any government statistics on that who might have written a market report on that no it's very quick to go through that once you start adopting the process or adopting the approach and very often like if I'm asked to write a research brief or a research proposal or I get a quickie query from someone who attended one of my courses I where will I find information on this I will often spend five or ten minutes and come up with half a dozen or ten useful resources but it is most productive if you decide first what you are looking for what am I trying to find out otherwise you get diverted this is very interesting and you go to this idea oh that's very interesting too and then you get diverted and then you forget where did I start so don't get pushed aside if I'm looking for the top 10 suppliers of garden plants in Netherlands then have that very much in my mind when I'm looking for the information stick to that don't be just what could I find out about plants in the Netherlands and I'll find advertisements tulips in Amsterdam and may or whatever it might be okay that is a very detailed answer thank you gene and do come in with me if I get this wrong but a lot of people have been asking about resources on the CIM website we can set the company name swath analysis the company gene mentioned it earlier as members you have access to ebsco that's ebsco very useful tool I would also recommend emerald publishing on your my CIM these are very important tools that as members you have exclusive access to and gene was very right to bring them up in her presentation so thank you for that gene unfortunately that's all we have time for today I'd like to say thank you again to gene for presenting this webinar thank you for everything I've learned a lot today and I'll be using it as soon as I get back to my desk but thank you to everyone for attending today as well once you leave today's webinar please bear in mind you'll receive a survey on the presentation and we would appreciate it if you would provide your feedback this is so we can give you the resources and the presentations that you want for your studies as a further reminder today this webinar is cpd eligible by submitting your cpd record you not only keep your learning and development on track but you could also achieve our prestigious chart and marketer status you can find out more of that at my CIM as well but you can get in touch with your membership team today if you have not already done so our next webinar is on March 16th on understanding your customer's digital journey you can find out more about that and sign up at exchange.cim.co.uk that's exchange.cim.co.uk that's our dedicated content hub one final thank you to gene for her presentation today and once again thank you for everyone who attended today's webinar on behalf of CIM we hope you enjoy the rest of your day thank you very much