Using published reports
Many organisations provide published reports on markets, particularly in technology markets. Here we add some of our comments on what to look for from published reports and perhaps when to buy and when not to.
Types of reports
The types of report you have available to you will depend on the topic area. One excellent source of information are government and quasi-governmental publications. These are normally produced to high quality with detailed description of methodology and detailed findings. Some may even have data in electronic format for your own manipulation.
Most commercial published market reports on the other hand are produced in one of two ways. Either the analysis house decides take a risk and research a market itself with a view to selling the end report, or they look to bring sponsors on board before starting the research.
Those reports that analysts produce and sell themselves are typically very general in nature and are unlikely to meet very specific information requirements but may fulfill general information needs (for instance in preparing a business plan for a financial investor). Those reports that are sponsored or syndicated studies will have had some input from sponsors. If you have the opportunity to become a sponsor, this means you have some influence in the design of the study. But sponsorship comes at a price and it may be more effective to conduct your own bespoke research.
Because the reports are for sale, it is likely that there is a synopsis or press release that will contain the main highlights from the report. Sometimes this is all you want to know. However some care is needed over copyright, and you may not have permission to use figures in your presentations.
Also look at the table of contents and length of the report to gauge how much of the content will be useful to you. In some instances only one chapter or section might be of interest and this may mitigate against the total cost. However, some analysis houses will sell you just the chapter for a reduced fee.
Data collection
The key to the quality of the information in the report is the way in which the data was collected. Most (but not all) of the IT reports are conducted on the basis of vendor surveys, with a few large end user studies thrown in for good measure.
These vendor studies are used to ascertain market size, share and forecast growth. However, vendors benefit if they overstate sales and growth projections, consequently some care is needed when looking at the figures. Even when these vendor studies work well, they tend to focus on current sales, rather than the installed base (or parc). If you are selling software for use on existing machines, the installed base figure is normally of more use, yet less widely available.
The alternative to vendor studies is to conduct a sample. Again some care is needed to review the size and distribution of the sample used. Some US studies of European markets may only be based a few hundred interviews across the whole continent. This may be adequate to look at Europe as a whole, but less so at any individual countries or industry sectors. Some companies such as Mintel do aim to provide reliable statistics with suitably large sample sizes.
Alternatives to full reports
Buying the full report may prove too expensive. However, many of the larger analyst houses (eg Gartner and IDC) produce subscription based newsletters that prove headline information from their reports on a month-by-month basis. This can be more useful than buying a one-off report as you can get a sense of the trends in the marketplace.
Most companies also provide a range of additional ways of getting to the data, including long term subscriptions (which is of most use where several reports will be of use over time), or by providing library access time, where reported can be read by not removed from the analysts offices.
For some areas published reports may not be available or may be too general for your needs. This is where you start to need bespoke surveys either quantitative or qualitative. For some markets ringing around 30-40 potential purchasers can provide reasonable initial indications of market demand. See our section on the basic of survey research or contact us directly for professional help.
For help and advice on analysing your market contact info@dobney.com