What I Like About Being A Secondary Researcher

Many companies do not have researchers, but quite a few bigger companies have teams of them, and I'm talking about market researchers here, not scientific ones. For those companies that do not have this type of employee in your stable, I feel for your project teams.

Though my experience is not extensive, my eyes were opened almost immediately when attempting to answer questions about what is going on in the world, what people are doing, what do they want to do, what is that company doing, how many people are doing that thing over there and for how long. Who knew what you could find! It's a treasure of information, if you only look (and pay) for it.

Tying the information to the need to know, so that a company can be profitable and successful, makes me feel like a key partner in both the frog teams and the client team. This is because of my involvement with the Strategy team, mostly. Providing the information to the product development team, the analyst team and the design teams, let's me know that the client will get a product that is useful, timely and well-designed from every aspect.

I almost always come in to work excited by what I will find that day, and just a tad stressed because I know there are many other places to look that I just don't have time for in every project. This is saying quite a lot considering that I filter through at least 30 emails a day from newsletters I have signed up for, not to mention the few RSS feeds of information I make it through (and the almost hundred I don't have time to make it through) as well as the many sites I find while researching a project in addition to those as well as the proprietary tools, such as Nexis, that I search through, and, finally, the sad stack of magazines on my desk, which are so wonderful that every page has something great on them, but it's hard to find the time.

I am not bored.

I feel that I have actually built whole new cities of super neuron highways in my brain over the past few years.

I hope this helps those of you who don't know anything about secondary research understand a little bit more about it. For those of you who do something similar to what I do, maybe you can spare a second to tell me if your experience is similar.