InfoGuides: MKTG 471: Marketing Management: MKTG 471

Welcome

Welcome, MKTG 471 students! I'm Kayla, your librarian for Business. I've designed this guide to help you with your course assignment. Below, you'll find instructions and tips on how to find:

Company/Firm Information, including financials
Industry Information for the broader industry in which your firm and product is situated, and
Product Information, including market share at the product-level

As Mason students, your tuition helps to fund the acquisition of important business resources via the Libraries. Many of our databases are used by major companies for commercial purposes; they are strong and contain lots of helpful information, but if you run into any difficulty along the way, please email me at kmorrow7@gmu.edu or schedule an appointment on the left-hand side of this guide.

Finding What You Need for Your Market Plan

While your market plan primarily focuses on a product, you will need to know a bit about the company/firm that sells your chosen product. If your company is public, you'll certainly be able to find information on Google or on the company's website. This is because public companies are publicly traded and are subject to strict reporting guidelines per the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); this means a lot of their information, including financials, is freely available. But because SEC filings can be hard to sort through, and because company-published sources are ultimately aimed at selling to investors, you'll want to rely mainly on the library's databases for company reports. These reports are thorough, reliable, and written by third-party analysts, and they compile much of the information you'll find on the web in one place.

*Before you start researching your company, you'll want to determine whether it's public or private because this will affect how and where you search. It is much more difficult to find private company information since they don't have to file with the SEC.

Mergent Online This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Mergent Online is a great database for finding public company information. Just search for your company and click on the company's report page to find information about your company's finances, corporate structure, competitors, and more.
NetAdvantage This link opens in a new window
NetAdvantage is another helpful company information database. It includes data, analysis, and news.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
To find company information, Choose "Companies" on the right side of the page. Get a snapshot of a company with links to more detailed information, including news, SEC filings, legal information, etc.
Factiva This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Factiva contains Company Reports as well as news from thousands of different newspapers across the world. News is an often underrated source of company information. Because it's so current, recent news can give you an idea of a company's big new products, actions, or strategies, along with public sentiment.

You'll need to find information about the broader industry your company/firm operates within. You will need to find information such as the industry's size (in revenue), forecasts, performance, etc. The databases listed below contain this information.

*Before you begin researching your industry, you need to know the industry's code. In America, industries are assigned a NAICS code (North American Industry Classification System code) which is a unique identifier for a specific industry. If you've never used or determined a NAICS code, try the NAICS code lookup tool: https://www.naics.com/search/. If you're unsure which industry best represents your chosen company and product, you can look back to the library's Company Reports, which list the primary NAICS codes that a company operates within.

IBISWorld This link opens in a new window
IBISWorld is the library's primary industry information database. It contains industry reports with industry descriptions along with information on the industry's performance and outlook, products and markets, competitive landscape, major companies (with market share), operating conditions, and key statistics. You can search for your industry by NAICS code, or you can begin typing a company or product in the search bar to see suggested reports.
Statista This link opens in a new window
Statista includes lots of helpful data about companies, industries, markets, consumers, and business trends. You can search for anything in the main search bar. Try searching for "{your industry name here}." In addition to industry information, you can also find market and company reports as well as consumer and product information, so don't hesitate to play around with searches!
Passport GMID (Euromonitor International) This link opens in a new window
Passport is going to be incredibly helpful for your market plan because it contains company, industry, consumer, and product information. On the right-hand side of the homepage, under the drop-down menu for "Search All Categories," select "Industries" and press "Go." Select the industry and sub-industry that most closely matches your product (again, these names might not align exactly with the NAICS code). At the bottom right of the page, click "Next," then select your Geography, and click "Search" at the top-right of the page. You'll see reports for market size, company shares, brand shares, and much more.
Mintel Reports Academic This link opens in a new window
Mintel reports for top business-to-consumer categories, tracking consumer attitudes and behaviors as well as market size, segmentation, and trends. When you click into the database, you can perform a keyword search or you can filter by "Category," etc. Please keep in mind that Mintel, unlike IBIS, does not report based on NAICS industry codes; instead, it is reporting on markets, so your industry may or may not match up exactly with the report titles you find.

Finding information at the product-level, for example market-share, is typically more difficult than finding information at the company/firm or industry level. This is because product-level information is only as available as a company chooses to make it. In other words, if a company doesn't report sales for your chosen product in their SEC filings (or elsewhere), it's unlikely you're going to find this information externally and, if you do, it's only an estimate. Some other potential roadblocks include:

Companies often report product sales in broad categories (e.g. Harley Davidson reports on unit sales of "Sport and Lightweight" motorcycles, but doesn't break this down amongst the specific products, e.g. the Nightster or the Sportster). In some cases, you might not even see anything more specific than "motorcycles."
Companies often report wholesale numbers or total shipments for a particular product, which means these product units may or may not have actually sold to a customer
Companies often report sales, market share, etc. only for their top-selling products, which might not include your chosen product

Some tips when hitting these roadblocks:

Keep trying: keep looking and broaden out your search to other databases and/or Google. You don't typically want to start at Google for product information, but if you aren't finding what you need in the library's databases, don't be afraid to google. I recommend doing a search like the following to make sure you find actual reports instead of just advertisements: toothpaste "market share" US filetype:pdf
Know when to compromise: When you've exhausted all of the library databases, the company's reports and annual filings, as well as Google, it's okay to recognize that the specific product information you need might not be publicly available. In this case, I recommend finding the closest available data you can. For example, if you can only find product data for a different region or country, be sure to include these numbers in your report. Or if you can only find information on a more general product category instead of your specific product, it's okay to include this data in your report and make an educated guess or projection for your specific product based on the other sources you found.
Ask Kayla! I'm here to help, so if you can't find what you need, please email me at kmorrow7@gmu.edu

Passport GMID (Euromonitor International) This link opens in a new window
Passport includes brand share information. When you enter the database, on the right-side under "Search all Categories," select "Brands" and press "Go." Type your brand name (e.g. Dove Men+Care) and select "Next." Confirm the Industry and press "Next," then confirm the Geography and press "Search" to see any relevant data.
Alternatively, if you can't find anything, you can also search for "Company Shares," which can help find company-specific share. data at the product-category level. Under the "Industries" tab, select your industry and find the "Explore Statistics" box. Select your Industry, Category, and Geography from the drop-down menus, then select "Company Shares" under "Choose Statistics."
Market Share Reporter This link opens in a new window
When you enter the database, click on "Advanced Search" under the main search box. Under "Select Series," choose "Market Share Reporter" from the drop-down menu. Perform a keyword search for your product name to see what comes up. You will often find market share charts at the product-level, taken from websites, trade journals and magazines, and other reliable sources.
Statista This link opens in a new window
In Statista, search for product sales and market share by keyword (e.g. "Hershey's kisses market share.") If you can't find any relevant results, broaden your search to include specific and total product sales (e.g. search for "Hershey's kisses sales" and for "chocolate candy sales")...if you know the number of units (or, alternatively, revenue) your company has sold of a product over a period of time as well as the total units sold by all companies of a product over the same period of time, you can calculate the market share by yourself.
Factiva This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
If you're unsuccessful with the above resources, you can try searching for newspaper or magazine articles in Factiva that report on the product you've chosen. You can try keyword searching for your product + "market share." You will sometimes find news articles and other sources with current sales and market share information.

For the Customer Environment portion of your Market Plan, you will need to find information about your target customer (whether it's an individual consumer or B2B). This might include demographics, locations, values and lifestyles, product usage characteristics, etc. The databases below contain this information.

Mintel Reports Academic This link opens in a new window
Mintel reports for top business-to-consumer categories, tracking consumer attitudes and behaviors as well as market size, segmentation, and trends. When you click into the database, you can perform a keyword search or you can filter by "Category," etc. Please keep in mind that Mintel, unlike IBIS, does not report based on NAICS industry codes; instead, it is reporting on markets, so your industry may or may not match up exactly with the report titles you find.
Passport GMID (Euromonitor International) This link opens in a new window
Passport has a tab called "Consumers," where you can find information about Households, Income and Expenditure, and Population for any country! There are hundreds of different data points for these categories, broken down by expenditure types, age, income and disposable income, gender, size and type and education of household, and much more. To find this, go to the top "Consumers" tab, then locate the left-hand blue box for "Explore Statistics" and choose the data you want along with your assigned location.
Statista This link opens in a new window
Try Statista again for consumer and market information. You can search for anything in the main search bar. Try searching for your product or "consumers of {your product name here}" to see if there are any datasets.