Category Analysis
Bring yourself up to speed by starting with a market or industry report. These secondary research tools define categories (sometimes not precisely as you would wish), estimate market size and growth potential, describe the competitive forces impacting the industry and identify key players.
Don't forget to take advantage of the links to trade news and associations to learn about the most recent developments.
MarketResearch.com Academic Limitations on Use
Provides marketing reports for many industries and demographic reports on a variety of age groups. Documents are formatted as Adobe Acrobat or PowerPoint files.
Limitations on Use:
Licensed for academic uses only. May not be used for commercial uses.
Mintel Insights & Analytics Limitations on Use
Offers product and industry market research reports covering U.S. and international marketplaces. Each report combines data and analysis of the competitive landscape, supply chain, market-share size and trends, and consumer profiles. Analytics advance search monitors new product activity in consumer packaged goods markets worldwide.
Limitations on Use:
Authorized users (on and off campus) limited to current Villanova students, faculty and staff.
Euromonitor (Passport)
IBISWorld
Provides access to U.S. and global industry market research reports.
Statista
Provides a portal to statistics and studies gathered by market researchers, trade organizations, scientific publications, and government sources. Topics covered include industries, media, companies, product categories, and countries.
Category Update
Update industry reports by browsing and searching trade journals and association web sites. These sources discuss latest trends, news about regulatory developments and hot topics.
General business article databases such as ABI Inform and Business Source Premier bring together relevant articles from a wide range of trade journals.
ABI/INFORM Collection (ProQuest)
Provides access to scholarly journals, dissertations, working papers, key business and economics periodicals, and country- and industry-focused reports.
Business Source Premier (EBSCO)
Provides access to a wide range of academic business journals and trade magazines. Topics include management, marketing, finance, economics, and management information systems. Full text access may be embargoed for up to three years. Coverage goes back to 1965.
Competitor Analysis
The first step in the competitor analysis is to choose relevant competitors. The industry reports, news you've gathered in the category analysis and the case itself should provide insight into firms competing in your defined market.
Once you have identified potential competitors reading company profiles and reports (see the list of databases below) will be helpful.
Of course you'll scour your competitors web sites, but don't neglect looking over 10K's or annual reports for public companies.
Note that reports and data on private companies may be sparse, so you may need to rely on news and an analysis of their web sites.
Just as you updated industry reports with news, do so for the competitor analysis.
Global New Products Database (Mintel)
Natural Medicines Database
Provides information on dietary supplements, natural medicines, and complementary, alternative, and integrative therapies. Contains tools including patient handouts, interactions checking, comparative effectiveness information, and pregnancy and lactation adverse effects checks. Updated continually.
Euromonitor (Passport)
D&B Hoovers
Offers public and private company and industry information including company profiles, market research reports from Marketline, Freedonia, Euromonitor, and RMA updated with recent news, executive profiles, and analyst reports.
NetAdvantage (Standard & Poor's Capital IQ)
Offers market information, company quotes, equity index information, industry information (including the S&P Industry Surveys), and economic data.
Mergent Online Limitations on Use
Provides detailed financial statements for U.S. and international public and private companies, including SEC filings and current and historical annual reports for U.S. and international public companies. Data can be downloaded in a variety of formats. Also includes country profiles.
Access limited to 4 simultaneous users.
Advertising Insights (Kantar Media)
Find out how much competitors are spending on advertising.
Customer Analysis
Market research reports are rich sources for understanding consumer behavior around product categories. Mintel and Marketresearch.com are particularly useful for understanding target customers be they parents or millennials or affluent consumers.
Surveys of consumer sentiment or attitudes or behaviors conducted by third parties may inform your customer analysis.
Customer analysis begins with estimating the number and possibly location of potential customers. Look to demographic data from the Census or other statistical sources.
Scholarly research (discoverable through ABI Inform, Business Source Premier & PsycInfo) on "consumer behavior" "consumer attitudes" purchasing or "decision making" may not always be timely but is typically reliable.
You may also find it beneficial to search the medical literature about the nature and epidemology of sleep disorders.
You may find some very interesting results by googling. Be discriminating about using reports that don't source data presented. See Business Sources: How to Evaluate Them
Catalyst MRI Simmons Tutorial
Provides access to the results of a National Consumer Study (most recent studies embargoed) encompassing demographics, lifestyle statements, and consumer behaviors. Supports the creation of custom cross tabulations or quick reports.
Data-Planet (Sage)
MEDLINE (Ovid version)
Another search option for the Medline portion of PubMed
UpToDate (Wolters Kluwer) Access Instructions
Offers evidence-based medical treatment guidelines, clinical images, calculators, drug information, and patient information sheets. All content is physician-authored.
Instructions for installing UpToDate Anywhere on mobile devices.
ESRI Business Analyst Online Tutorial Access Instructions
Provides geographic analysis tools. Includes demographic, consumer spending, and business data.
Access courtesy of the Department of Geography & the Environment.
To create your Villanova SSO account, click on the option Your ArcGIS organization’s URL and type villanova (right before .maps.arcgis.com), then Continue. On the next page, click Villanova SSO. The familiar Villanova log in page will appear.
PsycINFO (ProQuest) Tutorial
Provides abstracts and indexing to journals, books, book chapters, technical reports and dissertations in all areas of psychology. This database is produced by the American Psychological Association (APA). International in scope; coverage is from 1887 to the present.
Marketing Plan
Crafting a marketing plan is primarily a creative project. Nonetheless, expect to be able to defend your marketing recommendations by referring to studies and cases evaluating similar techniques. You can find "how to", practitioner advice and rigorous research on marketing topics in books and articles discoverable in the following databases.
Library Catalog
Yes! we have practice oriented books on marketing and advertising & many are digital.
eMarketer
Offers data and reports related to digital marketing. Topics include advertising spending, digital marketing, social media, media usage, e-commerce, email marketing, and device usage. Coverage is global.
WARC
Offers information on global advertising and marketing trends including case studies, articles, reports, opinion pieces, and expenditure data. Formerly known as World Advertising Research Center.
Advertising Age Datacenter (AdAge) Access Instructions
Features news, reports, and statistics about the advertising industry.