Marketing Research MKT 2110-06: Making a Company List

By using the name of a company, I can locate the industry. We did this in the section on Company Date when we looked up JetBlue. Scheduled Passenger Air Transportation is the industry for passenger carriers such as JetBlue. Now that I know the name of an industry I can then research that industry. Can you think of some reasons why this would be useful? I can think of three:

• I am researching this industry and having a list of the companies is useful 
• I want to sell something to these companies and having their contact information is very useful. 
• I want to start a similar company and I am interested in the market. Think about it? If we were going to start a coffee shop I would look to see how Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts succeed in the market place. 

Great, so in the following example my industry of interest is surgical manufacturers. i want to produce a list of the companies in that industry.

• Items 1, 2, and 3 are on how to look up a company,
• Items 3, 4, and 5 show you how to make a list of companies from an industry. 

In ReferenceUSA you can search for a company by name, by industry code or by its location.  Notice the description of the company includes the industry codes, company information, data about the company, competitors and so on.  The results that the search generates can be made into a list.

Follow these images to see how to build a list of companies within an industry. 

Start by clicking on the database link and then U.S. Businesses. 

1. The following search is for the company Becton Dickinson. 

2. Here are the search results for Becton Dickinson. I found 25 companies and they all look like they are a part of the parent company. To sort, click the blue arrow to the right. It should display the link to the company headquarters. Click on the company name to view. The company headquarters are where the hiring and other corporate decisions are made. 

3. On the Becton Dickinson page you can read about the company. To find competitors of Becton Dickinson you should scroll down to the industry codes. We will use the primary NAICS code (33911203) to find all of the competitors in the US that are in the market of Surgical & Medical Instrument Manufacturing.  I can use this code to search since it was created and is maintained by the Department of Labor. It will work here, in other business sources or just a web search. 

See the other codes? Check to see if there is an area of interest. 

4. OK - let's do the search to find all the companies within this industry. Go to top of the page and click on new search and then chose advanced search. Here we can search by business type.

Use the check boxes on the left and click on Keyword/SIC/NAICS under Business Type. Search by the primary NAICS code.

• Click and type in the code or even the name of the industry. 
• Click the code/description then click update count.   
  • The results before performing the search are 14,830,317 companies
  • Click update count and the number will drop to about 3400

5. Next I want to see a list of only headquarters for these companies. That will narrow the search down to only the company's home office. Chose Headquarter and then update the count. You want to have a smaller number of companies but they do vary by industry type.  

The count is lowered by selecting headquarters. Click on View Results and I will be able to see a list of companies within this industry. I can then click on and view each company record.. 

6. Here are all of the competitors in the US for your industry. The results can be sorted by size, address, city, etc. To further refine your results, simply select more search criteria. For instance, you might want all of the companies that have over a billion in sales, all of the companies that are headquarter in New Jersey or just the companies that have more 500 employees. 

Notice the download link at the top of the list?

You can download this list and then keep it as an excel file to use later for job searching. business contacts or market research. In fact, Click on the box at the top of the list to mark all of the companies. Go to the second page if you want but once you have marked the companies you want to download, then click the download button.

Downloading a list - you will see this page on the next screen. Chose the summary or the detailed and then click Download Records. The spreadsheet will go to your download folder. Congrats, your first list is downloaded. Revise your search and choose and another industry!