Use the resources in this box to create your brand overview and conduct your competitive analysis.
Investor Relations Websites- Google your company name and "investor relations" to locate these sites. They provide information on earnings, mission, corporate governance, and annual reports.
Product and market research is not always a straightforward process. No company provides the public with a detailed descriptions of their marketing plan. Learning about the plans, requires a thorough search of the product or market by analyzing the news, business journals, press releases, and blogs to make inferences about the strategy. Use the sources below to help you conduct these searches. By using a database, you ensure that you are accessing more reliable sources and are getting the most relevant, up-to-date content. It also helps that citation generators take out some of the guesswork of citing your sources.
Place phrases (or company names with more than one word) in quotation marks. This forces the database or search engine to find those words in that order.
Truncation allows you to search for multiple words by using that word's root. Most databases and search engines use the asterisk (*) symbol for truncation.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) allow you to combine or exclude search terms and produce more focused and relevant search results. The OR connector is especially useful when searching using synonyms.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) allow you to combine or exclude search terms and produce more focused and relevant search results. The OR connector is especially useful when searching using synonyms.
Proximity searching allows you to specify the maximum number of words between search terms. This is useful when you want to find terms that are close to one another but are not necessarily a phrase. The most common syntax for proximity searching is: n/X (ABI/INFORM Complete and LexisNexis) and nX (Business Source Premier). The X represents the maximum number of words between the search terms.
Review audience segments & social and life stage groups developed by Nielsen in their PRIZM data for ideas on how to craft your buyer personas.
Industry & Trade Associations: Many industry associations have statistics and other publications publicly available on their web sites. Google your industry and the word "association" to help locate these.
Example industry association: National Confectioners Association
