Marketing  Tags: business marketing  

Building a successful marketing campaign requires tailoring your offerings as closely as possible to what customers want and need. This guide will help you find sources of secondary data and information about

• Prospective buyers
• Product markets including leading competitors
• Advertising costs

Since not all potentially useful information is available to the public, doing your own primary research (focus groups, interviews, surveys, and the like) is sometimes expected in order to complete class projects. Your class syllabus should indicate whether you will need to go beyond library resources and gather primary data.

Click here to see the table of contents and call number of  A Survey Research Handbook. This book can be checked out for 24 hours. Cannot be renewed. Or click here to connect to an e-book about survey research. Or check out one of the books pictured below. 

H62 .B63 2004                   

    HF5415.2 .M3825 2007  

The basic building blocks of marketing are the 4 P's. These are the things that can be tailored to match values and interests of specific buyers. So these are factors that you may want to investigate in order to gain a competitive advantage. 

PRODUCT   Elements of the product range from its physical properties (e.g. durable, colorful, contemporary-looking) to a mental image (e.g. safe, trendy, ecologically responsible).

PRICE  This includes psychological "costs" such as inconvenience in addition to the actual purchase price.

PROMOTION   Most people think first of paid advertising but other forms of promotion such as coupons, free samples, or hiring actors to stir up some buzz before a product launch can also be effective ways to get the target customer's attention.

PLACE/DISTRIBUTION   This notion encompasses anything about where buyers get the product from point of access (big box stores, Internet, catalog sales, etc.) to the level of training and expertise sales people possess.

Your research could start with any of the following:

News: Mention of a technical product innovation, a new fad among a certain age group, or the impact of an economic phenomenon (e.g. sky-rocketing gas prices) in a magazine or newspaper article, a blog, or a t.v feature can lead you to a profitable busines opportunity. Scan recent articles from Business Source Complete or  Factiva or Lexis Nexis Academic for marketing ideas. Or depend on stories from media sources that you trust and check often online or in paper to choose a consumer group or specific product market of interest.

Published Market Research:  Click on the Market Research Data tab to find useful online and book sources of US and International marketing data.

Company and Industry Information:  Knowledge of your company's strengths and the viable opportunities out there can be found in articles and reports about specific companies. See the Company Information tab within this guide for hints about finding information and opinions from journalists, stock market analysts, and the company itself. 

Since no company operates in a vacuum, a variety of industry reports can also yield useful facts and pertinent observations such as market shares, leading competitors, significant factors driving a particular product market, and more. Click on the Industry Information  tab within this guide to see recommended sources.

Use IM to chat with staff at the Research & Information Desk. For information about how to visit us, phone us, or email us, visit the Ask Us! page.