Marketing 4550 

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.

Immediate help to get you started is available on a walk-in basis at the Research & Information Desk for most of the day or via our chat service as explained in the Ask Us link in the Meebo box at the right side of this page. 

For an hour-long, one-on-one consultation, you can stop at the desk or call 372-6943 to make an appointment for what we call an IRA. Each librarian has an assigned week to do these consultations. Intensive IRA's, when all reference and instruction librarians are available several times a week, start this semester on October 26 and run through November 20.

Ask at the Research and Information Desk or use Professor Wood's contact information on this page. She'll help you as a walk-in if not busy. Or make an appointment.

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 business 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 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.