Why Was This Guide Created?
This guide was created to help you find the best business information: company data, financial information on public companies, competitor information, SWOT analysis, and customer demographic data. This guide has all the databases you can use for your BUS 346 (Intro to Marketing) assignments. It is a terrific list of resources to find data for your startup company and for BUS 310 (Intro to Entrepreneurship). This guide is for everyone in need of business and market information.
Why These 9 Databases?
These databases are all subscription resources paid for by Cal Poly's library and your tuition. Global Market Information Database is paid for by the library, Oraflea College of Business, and the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Science. High quality business and market research is only available through expensive subscriptions. Access to these resources are limited to students, faculty, and staff at Cal Poly. The top nine databases were chosen by Orfalea faculty as the best sources of information for the class BUS 346. As your business librarian I believe these are the top sources for business information that we subscribe to and pay for.
Bias in Business Resources and Data Collection and Publishing
Some of the business resources listed below publish their own content (Global Market Information Database, MRI Medimark), while the rest of the databases purchase publishing rights from other content creators/providers. These database companies may be biased in a wide variety of ways, as to what they write about, how they do their research, and what content they license and publish. One hedge fund database calls out these biases in this paper: https://nilssonhedge.com/database-info/databaseinfo/database/database-biases/
Extra Resource! Sorry, Advanced Google search isn't "counted" as a resource in your BUS 346 Into to Marketing class, but many students use it for business research. Advanced Google searches most everything, while the databases have a constrained set of data/article/reports/content within their 'bucket.'
Original Google VS Advanced Google Search
There are two main ways of searching Google: what I call "original Google" is the classic simple page with one search box to enter in your search. The other way is super awesome and helpful: Advanced Google search.
Advanced Google helps you to search faster and better by narrowing your search to particular types of published stuff on the internet.
Advanced Google search allows you to narrow your search by Adobe PDFs. What this means is that when searching you can only get published reports and information in PDFs. So you don't get blogs, random stuff in you list of search results.
To search for PDFs on your topic, start at this page: https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Put in your key words or phrases at the top, then scroll down the page to get to "file type," and chose Adobe Acrobat PDF.and search.
For example I'm interested in market research on cat treats. So I entered my search words on top, the phrase "market research" and then chose Acrobat as the file type. My search looks like this: cat treats "market research" filetype:pdf
NOTE: The underlying computing that goes into searching the internet and delivering results is biased. Learn more about that bias:
Bias in Search Engines And Algorithms: https://libguides.scu.edu/c.php?g=887434