Part I: Introduction
This section provides an overview about the company and [proposed] product or service. If you are researching an existing company, you can search for it in the databases below. If you are creating your own company, try to research other companies that have a similar business or product to your new company. You may not find an exact match.
- PrivCo
Registration Required. See "more" for access information. PrivCo.com is a source for business and financial research on non-publicly traded corporations, including family-owned, private equity-owned, venture-backed and international unlisted companies. - Nexis Uni
Replaces LexisNexis Academic.
More than 15,000 news, business, and legal sources from LexisNexis—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790.
Part II: Environmental Scanning and SWOT Analysis
For this part, students will conduct research on internal and external environment of the business. For external environment, you may refer to Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, and Technological and Natural Environment (PESTN) factors that will affect or impact your market entry. For internal environment, these are the company itself, suppliers, customers and other marketing intermediaries. Students need to identify the major ones that will have impact to their proposed product/service. For external environment, researching the industry that the company is part of is very helpful.
- Statista
Easy to use statistics search engine with access to more than a million statistics and facts.
News sources for company, industry, product, business environment:
- ProQuest One Business
A comprehensive business database containing millions of full-text items across scholarly and popular periodicals, newspapers, market research reports, dissertations, books, videos and more. Includes the full text of the Wall Street Journal. Formerly called ABI/INFORM Collection - Business Source Complete
This is the world's definitive scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full text content. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included.
Part III: Market Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
These are useful points to cover this section:
a) What are the major segmentation variables and which ones will you be using to segment your market? Refer to demographic, psychographic, behavior graphic and geographic segmentation discussion covered in class.
b) Describe how you will determine your target market. Will you have more than one? If so, who are they?
c) Describe your differentiation and positioning strategies. Who are your major competitors? How are you going to be different from these competitors?
d) What is your competitive advantage? Why would your target market buy your product or service?
TOP PICKS:
- Passport
Country, industry, and consumer statistics and market research: Passport offers integrated access to internationally comparable statistics, full-text market reports, comment from expert industry and country analysts as well as thousands of sources of further information. - Data.census.gov
Data.census.gov is the new platform to access data and digital content from the U.S. Census Bureau. It replaces the American FactFinder website, which was retired in 2020.
This web site groups consumers into general categories, with brief descriptions and demographic information. Use the Zip Code Look-Up to get information about consumers in a particular area in both descriptions and graphs. There are three categories of information for consumers; PRIZM, P$YCLE, which describes the financial status of consumers, and ConneXions, which describes the level of technology use and connectivity of consumers. Use Segment Explorer to view descriptions of all of the consumer segments on the web site. Use the links on the left side of the screen to search for consumer groups by age, income, and other categories.
OTHER GOOD SOURCES:
Consumer Expenditure Survey: Bureau of Labor Statistics: US Labor Department
Statistics and reports on consumer expenditures, unemployment rates, and much more.
Experian Marketing Forward Blog: Freely available data, infographics, and reports on consumer behavior and trends.
Pew Research Center
A non-partisan research group that collects and presents data, opinions, and reports on American attitudes, activities, and trends.
Time Use Survey: Bureau of Labor Statistics: US Labor Department
Data on how American consumers use their time.
United Nations Demographic and Social Statistics
Includes information on demographics of countries, income and consumption, and more. Use the pull down menu for Demographic and Social Statistics. Then in each section, click on the Statistics link.
US Census Bureau International Data Base (IDB)
Statistical tables of demographic, and socio-economic data for 227 countries and areas of the world. Select data by country and year, then choose topics by using the pull down menu that says, Select Report.
Citing Your Sources
Whenever you do research, you will need to cite the information sources that you use. Most business scholars use APA style. Here are some tools that can help you with this task:
Gleeson Library's guide to citations: How? Why? When?
- APA 7th Edition Citations for Business SourcesAn excellent guide to using APA 7th edition style for popular business sources. Scroll through the guide to find an example for the business source you are using in your research. Compiled by librarians Naomi Schemm, Marcia Dellenbach, Zachary Grisham, Marianne Hageman, Natalia Tingle, Matt Trowbridge, and Amanda Wheatley
- Citing Business Databases in APA: Michigan State University GuideThis guide was created to help with citing some common business databases
- Citing Business Databases from the University of North Carolina at GreensboroThis guide has some additional business database examples in APA style.
- MLA Business Citations: Youngstown State UniversityScroll down the page to see citations for specific business web sites, reports, and databases cited in MLA style.
- Purdue OWLOur favorite style guide web site is the OWL from Purdue University.
- RefWorks
RefWorks allows users to create personal databases to manage, store, and share the information citations/references. Users can automatically insert references from their database into their papers and generate formatted bibliographies and manuscripts in seconds. See our RefWorks Guide for information about creating accounts, adding references, and using add-ons.
Getting Help!
There are several ways to obtain assistance with your research. Read on!
The School of Management has a library liaison named Penny Scott, and you can contact her for help.
Her contact information is: email: plscott@usfca.edu * phone: 415-422-5389
It is best to call or email ahead, or make an appointment, to make sure she is available!
If Penny is not available, or any time you need help, you can always get help, just Ask a Librarian!