Desktop research mainly used in secondary data research Secondary data are pieces of information that have been gathered and only might be relevant to the problem at hand. There are two basic sources of secondary data: The company itself (internal databases) and other organization or persons(external database).Secondary data mainly comes from newspapers, periodicals, internet, government (federal, state, and local) departments agencies, and trade and industry associations. Though the collection of these secondary data, you can have a general understanding of the general situation, market structure and development trend of certain industry.

Advantage of secondary data: Marketing researchers use secondary information because it can be obtained at a fraction of the cost, time, and inconvenience of primary data collection.
Limitation of secondary data: lack of availability, lack of relevance, inaccuracy, and insufficiency

Focus Group
Qualitative research and focus groups are often used as synonyms by marketing research practitioners. A focus group consists of 8 to 12 participants who are led by a moderator in an in-depth discussion on one particular topic or concept. The goal of focus group research is to learn and understand what people have to say and why. The value of this research methodology is that we may obtain some unexpected findings from focus group。
Advantage of Focus Group:
1. The interaction among respondents can stimulate new ideas and thoughts that might not arise during one-on-one interviews. And group pressure can help challenge respondents to keep their thinking more realistic.
2. Focus group often can be executed more quickly than many other research techniques.
3. In the focus group, uncertain and vague problems can be discovered and defined.
Depth Interview
Though the depth interview of leading enterprises in certain industry and their suppliers and sales companies, we can know their attitudes, views, hidden motivations to certain problem., and know their current situation and future development strategy. Depth interview can be used in competition research and strategy research.
Expert Interview
Expert interview is a way of data collection through the interview of experts form government agencies, industry associations, research organizations, leading enterprises, distributors and so on. Through expert interview, we can have a deep understanding of the current market situation, future development in certain industry.

Quantitative research includes such research methodologies as sampling survey and retail audit
□Sampling survey
Sampling survey covers a large area rather than focusing on the depth of the research. So it is not suitable for exploration research. Sampling survey includes door-to-door interviewing, mall intercept, telephone interviewing, mail survey and so on.
□Retail audit
Choose some typical distributors, and retail shops in certain industry for a continuous observation in order to track their sales, consumers, advertisement promotion effect, and competition situation. Retail audit is characterized of high efficiency, accurate data, and low cost.

Information used in industry research must be accurate, complete and timely. In order to meet this requirement, information must be collected through several different channels rather than one channel. The information from different channels must be made a comparison in order to prove the accuracy of the information. Strictly speaking, establishing an intelligence network is establishing a work procedure where information is collected, screened, processed, transmittted and feed backed.