Components of the Target Market Section
The target market section contains the following:
1. Who is the target market of the firm?
2. What social (demographic, sociological, psychographic) trends are most relevant in understanding its current situation and patterns of change.
Where do I look?
- Business Source CompleteBusiness Source Complete provides full text for scholarly business journals and other sources, including full text for more than 1,800 peer-reviewed business publications. Coverage includes virtually all subject areas related to business. This database provides full text (PDF) for top scholarly journals, including the Harvard Business Review. It also includes industry and country reports from Euromonitor and company and industry reports from Datamonitor.
- ABI/InformABI/Inform, an extensive international business and management database, contains bibliographic citations, abstracts, and full text of articles appearing in professional publications, academic journals, and trade magazines published worldwide. ABI/Inform covers the areas of accounting, banking, computers, economics, engineering management, communications, finance, health care, human resources, insurance, international trends, law, management, marketing, public administration, real estate, taxation, transportation.
- Mintel AcademicOffers yearly market research reports covering UK, Europe, US and International consumer markets for products, markets and demographics. Analysis includes market sizes and forecasts, market trends, market segmentation, competitive context, broken down segment performances, retail channels, consumer demographics and survey results, leading companies, brand share, marketing strategies, and more.
- TechnavioTechnavio provides market research reports for a variety of global industries, including technology, healthcare, retail, energy, aerospace, consumer goods and automotive. Unlimited report viewing is available, but each Cornell email address is limited to 20 downloads per month.
- FactivaFull-text online service for international news and business information. Covers over 28,000 sources in 23 languages in more than 150 countries. Some company and market research is included. Factiva includes full-text coverage of the Wall Street Journal.
- SimplyAnalyticsSimplyAnalytics is a web-based mapping application that allows you to create thematic maps and reports using demographic, business, and marketing data for the United States. Excellent source for locating demographic and marketing data for specific geographic locations.
- PassportExcellent resource for international industries, countries, markets, and products. Market research reports, statistics, and analyst reports cover consumer market sizes, country market data, forecasts, consumer lifestyles, companies and brands, and many product & location specific reports.
- Census Data: data.census.govA product of the US Census, data.census.gov is the replacement for American FactFinder. It includes data from the American Community Survey, 2010 Decennial Census, Economic Census, County Business Patterns and more.
Videos
Tips and tricks
How do I...
...locate information for this section?
- This section will be very easy for some companies, and difficult for others. In some cases, the target market it will be spelled out somewhere on the company website. In some cases you will need to find market research data to determine who is purchasing the service/product and make inferences as to what the target market is based on that. Be persistent, and do not be surprised if you have a hard time finding something that says "the target market for X company is Y demographic". You may have to make inferences based on the information that is available.
Other FAQs
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What do Demographic, Sociological and Psychographic mean?
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Demographic – Basic descriptive characteristics of the market, for example, age, sex, race, income, education level, where they live.
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Psychographic – Psychological drivers for people in the market, for example, living healthy, desiring convenience, preferring comfort.
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Sociological – Behavioral characteristics of people in the market, people who travel a lot for work, people who use computers a lot, people who eat out a lot.
- As a side note, psychographic tends to be what people believe and what drives them to act, whereas sociological is more how consumers actually act.
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Getting help with the assignment
Getting Help
- First and foremost, please watch the videos available in this guide. They will show you how to use the resources, and therefore find the information you need.
- If you need clarifications on the assignment, such as ratios or what each section means, please ask your TAs
- For questions about resources and research, Please visit the NEED HELP? page on this guide.