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Marketing Research Resources: Secondary Research

Marketing Research Resources at HPULibraries

What is narrative content?

Once you are comfortable with your company research, you can take a few minutes and look at what is called secondary data.

  • Secondary data is what others are saying or writing about the company, the market or the product.
  • These narrative resources will assure that I am on the same path as other researchers and can also provide me with summary data
  • This content should be from reputable resources which are often called journals, scholarly resources or peer reviewed.   

Sources for secondary content

ABInform (Abstracts in Business Information) provides access to business news, reports, research studies and other articles on topics in the business field. To locate content you can search by a company name, an industry, a product or just a word term or other topic.

Materials found here include all sorts of content. Here is a list. 

I can limit to these types of resources. 

Scholarly journals have the most content but the trade publications are very readable.   

Tesla and Market*  - notice that we just used the term Tesla (it is a unique name) and then I used the term Market*. 

  • The asterisk on the end of the phrase looks other words that start the same as the word Market - so marketing - marketers - markets. 
  • Using the asterisk works in Google as well as library search engines. 
  • I can also focus the search by limiting to publication type and by date - we usually limit to the last 5 years. 

Here is a short list of what I found with the Tesla and Market* search

There is a lot! I limited to Scholarly Journals and found some very current narrative. 

 

This article is one of the best in the group. Take a look. It is from a good journal source and provides a great deal of content. 

Click on the article image to see the article. The Cite button will provide you with an APA citation to this article.  

Need more? 

The asterisk works well but you should also try the quote marks. So here is a new search on Market share. 

Tesla and "market share" 

The quote marks make the source look for the words but only when they occur side by side.  

So here are those search results. 

 

 

Reading a research article

As researchers we have to tell others (readers - professors) where we found information that we use in our papers, presentations, poster or even business presentations.  

Here is the citation to the article on Tesla and market share: It follows a very simple pattern. 

Authors. (date). Article title. Journal Name, Volume(issue), page numbers. http://doi

Journal article example:

Musonera, E. & Cagle, C. (2019). Electric car brand positioning in the automotive industry: Recommendations for sustainable and innovative marketing strategies. Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, 14(1), 120–133. https://doi:10.33423/jsis.v14i1.991

Browsing a research article: 

Articles are usually divided into sections.

  • Title and Author 
  • Abstract (summarizes the article) 
  • Introduction (what is the author trying to prove?) 
  • Methods (what did they do to prove their theory or idea?)
  • Results (what was the outcome?)
  • Discussion (this is where the author summarizes the results of their research.)

What do I pay attention to when I am reading?

  • Start with the Title and the abstract - is it current and does it cover what you are researching?
  • If yes - keep a copy and then later read the introduction and the discussion. 
  • Stop reading! For now that is all you need. 

Newspaper Sources

Looking for more? Newspapers are a great source for company and company marketing data.