Great research is necessary for making communicated business decisions, determining strategic plans and effective marketing. The information created by the research can be used to find new markets, new products and new users for products that already exist. Research can also help in decreasing inefficiencies by identifying gaps and saving business time and money. The gathering and analysis of data can be divided into primary data and secondary data. Primary data is collected for the purpose of the research itself and it ensures that data would be suitable for the research and marketing purpose. However, gathering primary data can incur higher costs and more time. It also requires proper skill sets and resources in order to properly interpret the data. Secondary data is the data already gathered at the time of research. We put them to use without having to collect them again by ourselves. They might sometimes deemed be deemed as even better than primary data subjectively may involve employing unbiased tools on numbers and statistics.
For example, Markwell and Basche(1998) qualitative tools have become more widely used in tourism analysis. It has been discussed that the techniques of other social sciences such as consumer behavior and social anthropology might be useful when applied to tourism.