Research Guides: Marketing Research: Marketing Research

Consumer/Target Market Demographics, Behavior, and Trends

Start here:

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.

On-Campus Link
Statista
Easy to use statistics search engine with access to more than a million statistics and facts.

Categorized into over 20 market sectors, Statista provides business customers, researchers, and the academic community with direct access to relevant quantitative facts on agriculture, finance, politics, and many more areas of interest.

Sources of information include market researchers, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases.

On-campus link
Data.census.gov
Data.census.gov is the new platform to access data and digital content from the U.S. Census Bureau. It will replace the American FactFinder website, which will be retired in 2020.

The earliest data on data.census.gov will be from the 2000 Census. American Community Survey (ACS) Data will not be available prior to 2010 with the exception of the 2009 Comparison Profiles. All ACS data, including 2005 to 2009 data, are available in the Census Data API.

For detailed information about the new platform see this guide.

Claritas: My Best Segments
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.
ESRI Zip Code Lookup
Use this free collection of ESRI data to find psychographic, demographic, and behavioral information on consumers by U.S. zip code. To search: Click on Start Exploring, then type in your zip code. Then click on Segment Description, Read More, and Click for More Details to get behavioral and psychographic consumer information.

San Francisco Indicator Project
Provides easy access to hard-to-find community data, broken down by neighborhood.

Then try these:

Pew Research Center
A non-partisan research group that collects and presents data, opinions, and reports on American attitudes, activities, and trends. Browse by topic, or type in your search.

American Time Use Survey
Data on how American consumers use their time. Scroll down to view topics and tables of data.
Consumer Expenditure Survey (U. S.)
Statistics and reports on consumer expenditures, unemployment rates, and much more.
US Census Bureau International Database (IDB)
Just choose your country from the drop down menu, then choose your year. Click submit. You'll get birth rate, population, and more!

Industry/Business Marketing Research

IBISWorld
Information on over 700 US Industries in the US economy.

Classifying Industry Reports at the 5-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), IBISWorld Industry Reports are at the granular level covering industry-specific titles from the popular to the not so popular. Each Industry Report is some 35-50 pages in length with abridged, 6-page Executive Summaries also available.

On-Campus Link

Articles on Consumers, Industries, and Markets

ABI/INFORM Collection
One of the world's most comprehensive business databases, and the only one with the full text of the Wall Street Journal, ABI/INFORM Collection makes a smart starting point among our many business resources.

Launched in the early 1970s, ABI/INFORM remains the gold standard when it comes to business research databases. ABI/INFORM Complete’s massive content set—which includes important full‐text journals and much sought‐after titles from the business press as well as key trade publications, dissertations, conference proceedings, and market reports—will help today’s researchers resolve tomorrow’s problems.

ABI/INFORM Complete includes all content found in ABI/INFORM Global, ABI/INFORM Dateline, ABI/INFORM Research, and ABI/INFORM Trade and Industry. It also includes ABI/INFORM Archive, which offers a deep backfile of many of the most important business journals of the last century.

Through agreements with some of the world’s most prestigious publishers—including Cambridge University Press, Dow Jones & Company, Emerald Group Publishing, Dun and Bradstreet, Palgrave MacMillan, the Financial Times Group, and the Economist Intelligence Unit—ProQuest provides access to hundreds of key business titles.

Key ongoing full-text journals include:

Journal of Economic Literature
Journal of International Business Studies
Organization Science
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Academy of Marketing Science Journal
American Economic Review
Accounting Review
Supply Chain Management
MIT Sloan Management Review
China Quarterly

Key ongoing full-text periodicals include:

Wall Street Journal
Financial Times
Economist
SmartMoney
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.

In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 25,000 most-cited authors in the database. Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Complete is the overwhelmingly superior database for full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics.

Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.

On Campus Link

Statistics/Market Share

Statista
Easy to use statistics search engine with access to more than a million statistics and facts.

Categorized into over 20 market sectors, Statista provides business customers, researchers, and the academic community with direct access to relevant quantitative facts on agriculture, finance, politics, and many more areas of interest.

Sources of information include market researchers, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases.

On-campus link

Market Share Reporter
Online. To use, select Market Share Reporter from the menu, "Select One or More Directories." Provides the market share for many companies within an industry, shown with pie charts and graphs. Each entry features a descriptive title; data and market description; a list of producers/products along with their market share.

Finding Other Businesses in your Industry

referenceUSA
Directory information for publicly and privately owned companies in the United States, as well as information about individual consumers.

ReferenceUSA is compiled from over 5,000 Yellow page directories, Business White Pages, Corporate Annual Reports, SEC 10K reports, Chamber of Commerce Directories, state directories, and other public information sources. It is searchable by Yellow Page heading, Industry group, SIC code, city or geographic area, employee size, sales volume, and consumer name.

ReferenceUSA also allows you to create heat maps of your business list based on many of the criteria listed above.

On-Campus Link

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:

Citing Business Databases in APA: Michigan State University Guide
This guide was created to help with citing some common business databases
Citing Business Databases from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This guide has some additional business database examples in APA style.
MLA Business Citations: Youngstown State University
Scroll down the page to see citations for specific business web sites, reports, and databases cited in MLA style.
Purdue OWL
Our 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. Create an account using your USF email address.

Create an account using your USF email address.

If you do not want to use your USF email address:

on campus: create an account with any email address.
off campus: use the link above and this invitation code: 5951-1639
Please note, even though you will be prompted for a "university email address," you may enter any email address.

(You can still use the Old RefWorks) Group Code: RWUSanFrancisco

New RefWorks Guide
Legacy RefWorks Guide

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!

Related Research Guides

Multicultural Marketing Research
Consumer Research
Industry Research

Gleeson Library

Marketing Research

Reference Librarian/Business Liaison

Ask A Librarian: Penny

Penny's Office Hours Spring 2020