When it comes to marketing research, there are many routes one could take in getting the information necessary to make a decision. If the information doesn’t exist as secondary data, then companies have to take it upon themselves to provide data through primary data. Primary data includes marketing surveys and experiments, two forms of data collection that seem similar but are very much so different.
Surveys are the best way to get into the heads of many consumers at once, and finding out their attitudes or desires of products, as well as valuable information about themselves such as income level or gender. For example, as I am ramping up to execute an upcoming campaign on a security awareness training program, I might want to send out a survey testing awareness and likelihood to purchase a training program to our target audience.
Experiments are similar to surveys, and some companies even incorporate surveys into their experiments. Experiments are usually done to test a hypothesis or study factors/variables in isolation among a small group of people. Using the example of the security awareness training campaign I will be deploying soon, I may want to do an experiment on the pricing of the program or even the testing of different ad copy to see which ad I should pick.
