Marketing 255

You need to find a lot of different types of information for this assignment. Depending on the product you select, this can be fairly straightforward or it can be nearly impossible.

In order to improve your chances of selecting a product/company whose information will be easier to find there are a few things to keep in mind.

• Choosing a product from a publicly-traded company. These types of companies are legally obligated to publish their financial information. Privately-held companies are not obligated to do this.
• There are a couple ways to learn if a product is made by a publicly-traded company. One of the easiest is to go to the parent company website and see if they have a section deveoted to investor information, e.g. Pepsico.
• Library eResources like Business Source Complete and Passport GMID contain a lot of product, company and industry information but this information can be deep and rich for some and minimal for others. You may want to select a product by going through the Industry and Company search/browse features in those two eResources. If you can't find reports for your product/company in these two sources you may want to consider selecting another one. Library staff can help you with your searches.

Two of most important sources for information you can find in this eResource are Company and Industry profiles. One of best ways to search them is the browse feature.

Watch these two videos to see how you can search for these types of profiles: Business Source Complete Videos

This eResource provide multiple ways to search for information on companies, products and industries.

You may get better results by using the browsing features of the product as opposed to using the search box. If you hover over the Industries link at the top of the page or use the Browse Tree feature it can lead you to a lot of information about your product, brand, company, or industry.

If you have any questions about how to navigate through Passport GMID, come to the Research Help Desk in the library and we can assist you.

Use IBISWorld to find industry information. Either search for an industry using the search box or browse for industry reports using the NAICS code or topic. 

This eResource is useful for finding data about consumer behavior. This video provides an overview of how to navigate it and you will learn what kinds of data it contains: Vividata video.