Research statistics and market sizing data can help enormously when trying to present a case for business investment, a particular strategy, or a change in direction for your portfolio.

A good marketer can generally be relied on to find data to support most arguments, but it's amazing how naive people can be when demanding more obscure data research, or specific information on target clients.

Before you get into the bottomless pit of buying in or commissioning specific information, you should ask yourself two questions:

Is this something with a broad market appeal that would logically have been researched already and therefore might be available 'off the shelf'?
If not and you need to commission someone to get it for you, is what you want to know realistic? If someone tried to get the information from your business for example, how hard would they find it? And if it's not something you would disclose to an outside party, why would you expect that someone else would?

Unless you can answer these questions positively, you'll likely end up in a costly and time-consuming exercise that may have you question why you started in the first place.

Perhaps you will need to consider other means to achieve the outcome you want.