 I have talked so far about what to research and whom to research. The next question is how do I research? So there are two primary methods of research. One is secondary research and one is primary research. Primary research is when you collate data and findings which others have collected. So how do you do that? Online search. The easiest is go to Google one of the browsers and do an online search. You can also look at public reports and public databases. I will show you some examples of that. You can also have trends and technology reports which are published by big research companies. And I will show you a couple of examples. That's secondary. Primary research is when you go out to the field and you collect first-hand data. It's not second-hand data. It's first-hand data and therefore it's called primary research. And there are some standard ways that I recommend to you. I will explain this later but some of these techniques are called walk the streets. Another technique that you can follow and I recommend to you is watch the trolley. I will explain a bit more later on. And then of course there are things like focus groups and online surveys. Let me show you some examples. How do you do online search? Clearly you go to a browser. You can use Google, you can use DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Bing. And for the last one year or so, you've got chat GPT. So you can always go to chat GPT or an open AI and you can type in your research questions and you'll get a lot of data. There's still secondary second-hand data. You can also look at academic sources. So some of the world's best are you can go to the Harvard Business Review. You can do it. You can look it up online or you can go to an MIT Technology Review. You can go to Google Scholar or you can just walk to a library, the picture below. You can go to a college library or you could go to a public library. And these are what are called academic resources. Some of it will be paid for and you have to pay for them, but a lot of it will be free. And if you're doing a research for business reasons, I strongly recommend that you actually go for the paid version and get exactly what you're looking for. You can then look at consultancy reports. They're the big consultants, McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group or BCG. They're the big four, KPMG, EY, Price Waterhouse, Deloitte. They're all published, what are called white papers. And you can always go and do a search of your topic and name some of those consultants that are publishing the white papers. So that's another source and get a lot of data for free. And if it's for business, I suggest you go for the paid version. Government database. The lot of government database which has a lot of detailed data. The most important one and the most extensive one maintained by the government of India for India is the website that you see, data.gov.in. And you can see lots and lots of data which is there for you in that database. And other companies and other countries also have government databases. You can also go to financial databases. These are financial journals or financial sites or financial apps which give you a lot of data, financial data. But they'll give you only financial data. So for India, Money Control, Sher Khan, etc., the very good financial databases. And you can get a lot of data on sales and profits, margins, etc. Globally, you can look at Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg, etc. A lot of it will be free, a lot of it will be paid for. If you're doing it for business, I suggest you pay for it. But you'll get a lot of it free anyway. The other thing I strongly recommend that you use is Google Trends. So basically, if you go to a site which is called Google Trends, you can find it yourself. You can type in your search term and from Google, you'll get to know what is a trend. So for example, you want to launch new soap with a new smell in a new packaging. And you want to see what is the trend for soaps. Is it going up? Is it going down? Which countries is it going up? Which countries is it going down? Within a country, where is it going down? Where is it going? All of that, you can get through Google Trends. And you can look at it for different periods of time. Last three months, six months, one year, five years, ten years. Obviously, if you want to grow your business, you want to capture trends which are increasing. But sometimes you find the trends which are decreasing and then you know that if a business is in trouble, because the trends are decreasing, the consumers looking for something else, it's a no-brainer that the market and the customers and consumers are going away from what you are offering. There are also technology trends that come up and Gartner does a very good job of declaring, researching and declaring what are the emerging trends. So this is an extract from a Gartner report for 2022. And you can look at what are different technologies which are emerging, which are mostly on the left side. And they're emerging techs and there's a lot of hype around it. There's a lot of expectations, but they're not yet tested out. And then as you go up, you get a bit more mature technologies where the expectations are also being met. And then you get into very mature technologies which are kind of flattening out. Artificial intelligence, of course, is extremely important. But within artificial intelligence, there are many, many, many subsets of AI, different kinds of AI. And if you look at the Gartner report, you can look at how different AI ideas are on the emerging curve. And I strongly encourage any of you who are trying to develop a tech-based business or a startup to go and study these reports. Now let's look at some of the primary ways of research. Where you are gathering the data yourself, walking the streets, where you just go out on the roads and look around. So if you're doing a survey of cars, which brands are selling, which brands are not selling? What kind of cars are selling, not selling? Big cars, small cars, SUVs, sedan, hatchbacks, what's the easiest way? You go to a car park and look around. And it gives you a feel of what's selling, what's not selling. If your company is making cars, you can also go to a car park and look at how many cars your company has and what is the total number of cars. Very easy way of gathering the first hand data. It may not be very scientific but it gives you a feel. If you are in products, smaller products which are sold in stores, you can walk into stores and look around for your product versus all the other products. And you get a first hand feel of what's going on. And if you meet enough number of shopkeepers, you'll slowly build a database. This is a primary way of doing research. You are gathering the data yourself. Similarly, you can go to a mall if you're selling or you're in the business of products which are bit high end, apparel, fashion, watches, phones, etc. Those are sold in the mall. So you can go and have a look and see if your store or your outlet has a lot of traffic and nobody else has, you're probably in good shape. But if your store is empty and the competitor stores are full, then your business probably has a challenge. Watching the trolley is when you go to a supermarket or a hypermarket, a star bazaar, D Mart, etc. And you watch the trolley at the check-in point or the checkout point where the customers are paying the money. And look at what brands are in the trolley. If you're in the soap business, are customers buying your soap or someone else's soap? If you're in the food business, are they buying your food or someone else's food? If you're in the drinks business, are they buying your drinks or someone else's drink? And you get a first-hand read. And if you study enough number of trolleys, you'll get a database. So these are, again, a primary research technique. If you want to do a survey, the easiest way to do a survey is to use Google Forms. It's free. You just fill up, you go to the site, you can do an internet search, go to the site, create a form online, and you just mail it out. And then you collect the data as the data comes in. Google Forms will allow you to analyze the data. And there are other companies, like Valtrix, which also help you do online surveys. And this is how you can do a simple questionnaire design, a customer survey. You can ask the name of the customer, the email ID of the customer, and then you start asking a lot of questions about your products. Again, this is primary research, but this is not a physical walking the streets or watching the trolley. You are doing an online survey. This is primary research, again physical, which is called focus groups, which means a group of people who are relevant and focused on the product that you are trying to sell or the business that you are in. So you actually sit down with people and you ask them questions physically face to face. And if you meet enough number of people, you start getting data, and from the data you can get conclusions and actions. So we've talked about why do you want, why do you need to research? Whom should you research? How to research? What went to research? So there are two kinds of research again. One is ongoing. Most good companies will ongoing do researches. It could be a research of market shares, a monthly market share report. Just to keep an eye on whether the shares are going up or shares are going down. It could be an ongoing every month, every three months, every year, consumer insights. What are the customers and consumers telling you? Shopper research, competitor insights. And there are agencies that I talked about before. Global companies, large global companies like Nielsen or Kantar or Ipsos who publish reports on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, annual basis, and you can buy those reports. And this is ongoing research. The second is strategic research. You don't do it every month, every three months or every year. You do it when you have a big initiative coming up. For example, you want to launch a new product. Should you launch this product? Should you not launch it? If you have a new competitor who has come in and disrupting the market, you want to study what the competitor is doing and what's impacting your business. If there's a new disruptive technology that has come in, for example, child GPT, blockchain, et cetera, or if there's a new law, what is the impact of that law? Some tax has gone up. Some restrictions have been put by the government. You have to research what is the impact of that. But these are strategic and these are one-off and they're let when a certain event happens. So this is when to research. In market research, you'll gather a lot of data. So what do you do with the data? So you analyze the data. You can have gigabytes of data, thousands or millions points of data. What do you do with all of that data? And you can do different kinds of analysis. I'm not going to get into those analysis. A lot of it is statistical, but some of it can also be qualitative. So the quantitative methodologies are things like statistical analysis within that regression analysis, conjoined analysis, variation analysis. Again, since this is not a statistics course, those of you are interested can take a course on statistics and actually learn some of those data analysis techniques. But you can also look at qualitative data, verbatim, what the customers are telling you. It could be descriptive. You know, your car is too small, too cramped, too slow, too fast. So it's a descriptive. It's not a data, but it's a description. And if enough people tell you that, then it's probably something you need to act on. Sentiments. I love it. I hate it. Emotions. Cricket. For example, anything to do with cricket. It's a very emotive topic in India. IPL. I love the team. I love one of those IPL teams. Why? So it's very emotive. And then you've got loyalty. I will only wear this dress or this brand. I will only buy this phone, this brand phone. And these are qualitative, not necessarily data. I'm very loyal to this. I'll only go to that restaurant. I will only eat that kind of dish. I like South Indian food or North Indian food. So these are qualitative. I like spicy food. These are qualitative versus the earlier set of quantitative techniques. Again, those of you are interested in data analysis, strongly urge you to take a data analysis course, either on NPTEL or in your college. And therefore, there are all this kind of analysis that you can do. And you can see on the screen, market drivers and trends. And within that, there are many parts of it. Segmentation. Segmentation is different kinds of market. For example, in a car market, you've got big SUVs, sedans, hatchbacks. In phones, we've got tablets or 6.5-inch phones, 6-inch phones, camera phones, et cetera. Food. Again, if you look at segmentation, North Indian food, South Indian food, Chinese food, Bengali food. And then competitor analysis. Which are the companies? What are the financial ones? How big are they? The big competitors, small competitors. Profitable competitors, not so profitable competitors. Computer which offers everything versus a computer which offers only a specific kind of product within that category. And company news. So these are all the market analysis. Because after you've collected the data, you have to analyze. And these are the kinds of analysis that you can do using the techniques that I talked earlier. And based on those analysis, what is the end point of market research? Is to make business decisions. Whether you are the chief marketing officer, or the chief executive officer, or the chief operating officer, or the chief financial officer, ultimately all the market research and the analysis leads to business decisions. All the business decisions. Oh, customers are not getting what they want in this particular area. So our company will launch a new product. Other business decision could be, it's a market which is exploding. The market is really growing big. But we are not present in that market. Let us enter that market. So new market entry. External competition. New companies. New competitors coming into the market. So we need to do something. Improve the product. Reduce the price. Increase distribution. Have more variety. So I need to react to stop the competitor. Internal capability. I have operated for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years using this technology. But a new technology has come. We upgrade our production facilities and adopt that new technology for the same product. Make it more efficiently, cheaper, better. That's an operating decision. And then launch or not launch. And if you are an entrepreneur, do you start up or do you not start up? So these are business decisions, which is the final endpoint of all the MR market research, competitor research, customer research, product research, technology research that you do. Because ultimately, it is all about building a better business. So with that, again, I'd like you to reflect and write down in your journal, you have thought about a product in your earlier reflection point. You would have thought about who to research, how to research, what to research. Now, write down in your journal, how will you research? Primary, secondary. Will you walk the streets, watch the trolley? Will you do Google Trends, Google Search? Will you look at a McKinsey report or a Boston Consulting Group report, et cetera, et cetera? So reflect for three minutes. So I'd like to end this module by sharing with you if you choose a career in market research. Because all good companies do a lot of market research. So there are a lot of career opportunities. Or if you want to research the market for your startup. Or if you want to join a market research company like Nielsen or GFQ or Kantar, any of those good companies, what skills should you start building now? The first skill you should build is learn about research techniques. There are many good courses on NPTEL and maybe in your college. So enroll and learn about quantitative research or qualitative research and understand what is market research, methodology. Do a course on data analytics, which will probably take you in the area of mathematics and statistics. Big data has many career opportunities. It's also important if you're doing your startup. So acquire those skills. Apart from that, you need to have critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is very objective thinking, typically asking the question in any situation, what, who, how, when, why. So there are courses on critical thinking and I encourage you to develop those skills. But since market research also ultimately has a business context, you also need to develop marketing and product management skills because it cannot just be a mathematician or a statistician or a researcher. To be a really good marketing or a good chief executive officer or a good entrepreneur, you also need to get the basics of marketing and product management and I encourage you to do a couple of courses and learn these skills. Finally, it's all about presentation and communication. You may do a great job on researching, analyzing, understanding and coming up with some recommendation, but you have to be able to present and communicate to your stakeholders. It could be your bosses, it could be the company owners, it could be the CEO, it could be your investors, it could be press, etc. You have to be able to present and communicate. And therefore, you must continuously develop your presentation and communication skills. So with that, we come to the end of this first module of my course, Business Fundamentals for Entrepreneurs, Part 2, External Operations. Thank you. Namaskar.