The Pira Methodology: Research elements

Pira International is engaged in a range of primary and secondary research activities, a large proportion of which is undertaken in-house with the remainder conducted by external consultants and researchers.

Primary research

The key elements of Pira's primary research capabilities are:

• Telephone/face-to-face interviews
• Online surveys
• Focus groups

Pira International undertakes a degree of primary research in all its research projects, with general discussions with industry contacts carried out by all analysts. Many projects - mainly single-client and multi-client consultancy - require a comprehensive survey programme, typically involving 10-25 face-to-face interviews of senior personnel in key companies across the value chain, conducted by Pira consultants and researchers or associate consultants, as well as one or several hundred telephone surveys conducted by Pira researchers and external researchers or organisations. Towards the end of each project, consultants or analysts will do a number of follow-up interviews in order to gather informed responses to preliminary conclusions. These meetings take the form of a discussion rather than an interview, allowing a greater two-way flow of information and ideas between participants

Pira organises focus groups on a regular basis, generally in support of client-specific projects. Pira also undertakes a number of online surveys, including industry-wide surveys in support of its general market research programme as well as individual client projects.

Secondary research

Secondary research is carried out by Pira employees in-house as well as by external researchers. The majority of market research data collection and collation of UK, pan-European and US sources is handled internally, while Pira associates worldwide assist in respective local market research activities. Analysts work alongside the Head of Market Research to establish key secondary sources, and will themselves undertake general online, library (Pira, British Library, etc.) and other research work using the sources listed below. Third-party reports, meanwhile, tend to be consulted to ensure that Pira is able to provide a high degree of data granularity versus its competitors, as well as sometimes compare data.

In summary, key sources include:

• Trade associations
• National statistics offices, Eurostat
• Inter-governmental organisations (UN, WHO, IMF, etc.)
• Pirabase, Paperbase abstracts services
• Factiva, other third-party news search databases
• Company annual/etc. reports, analyst presentations, etc.
• D&B online, FAME, other company databases
• Conference proceedings, directories, technical books, trade journals
• Patent databases
• Third-party reports, data, etc.
  

In-house databases

Pira maintains large in-house databases for each of its core areas of packaging, print and paper, as well as databases for nonwovens and other research areas. In addition, we also have in place databases for internal reference purposes, including regularly-updated country-by-country statistics on economic and demographic trends, media and advertising trends, literacy rates, Internet/PC penetration and similar indicators. Other databases include information on manufacturing output and production capacity in key industrial and consumer end-use markets for packaging, print and paper; raw materials output/pricing trends; retail sales data and other such elements.

In-house databases bring together information on market trends, as well as relevant upstream and downstream markets trends, linked into relevant economic and other data. Historical market trends are assessed versus GDP and other factors in order to ascertain as to whether correlations exist, and where this is the case GDP/other forecasts from respected sources are employed to predict market movements in the future on the basis of equations developed using econometrics. Modelling will typically produce growth forecasts from year to year, and then often for the course of a decade or agreed period of an economic cycle. These outputs will tend to be provided as indicative, and then reconsidered in the light of any structural changes arising from a boom/downturn or the impact of disruptive technologies, etc. If the final market forecasts produced by the analyst or consultant deviate significantly from the initial figures generated by the model, then these are addressed in the course of accompanying analysis.