Library and Web Resources

1. Current news

• Factiva covers 8,000 leading business newspapers, magazines, trade journals, newsletters, and television and radio transcripts.
• LexisNexis Academic covers nearly 5,000 newspapers, television and radio news broadcasts, and wire services from around the world.
• For New Jersey newspapers (or papers from other states or from specific countries), use Access World News.

2. Environmental scanning

• Business Source Premier covers business and management topics including company histories, competitive intelligence, product development, consumer behavior, and industry analysis and forecasts. It contains citations, lengthy abstracts, and in many cases, the full-text of articles from several thousand U.S. and international professional publications, academic journals, and trade magazines.
• The Business & Industry Database is an index to business trade periodicals which includes abstracts, extracts or full-text for all articles covered.
• Tablebase specializes exclusively in tabular data on companies, industries, products and demographics, including: company and brand rankings, imports and exports, industry and product forecasts, and market shares.

3. Industry analysis

• Mintel Reports offer product and industry market research reports covering US and International marketplaces. Each report combines data and analysis of the competitive landscape, supply chain, market-share size and trends, and consumer profiles.
• The MarketLine Business Information Centre includes over 2,500 original industry research reports.
• The Business Insights database provides more than 400 full-text strategic management and market analysis reports on selected industry sectors: Consumer Markets, Healthcare, Energy, Financial Services, and Technology.

4. Consumer market analysis

• The mother of all data sources is the U.S. Census Bureau, with profiles of states, counties, and selected cities at State and County QuickFacts
• For the latest detailed data from the U.S. Census 2000, start with American FactFinder and select Summary File 3.
• An alternative to the American FactFinder is CensusScope, which is a portal to Census 2000 data. This site offers colorful charts, graphs and maps for many frequently requested data sets.

5. Competitive landscape: Private companies

• ReferenceUSA offers detailed information on more than 14 million U.S. businesses.
• For industrial products and services, consult the ThomasNet directory.
• Use SuperPages.com to search for businesses by location and display the results on a map.

6. Competitive landscape: Public companies

• MarketLine Business Information Centre provides 10,000 company profiles and 500 company SWOT analyses.
• LexisNexis Academic includes Hoover's reports on companies and their competitors.
• Mergent Online is a database of corporate information covering over 22,000 U.S. and foreign public companies.

7. Sample Plans

• There are 21 free Sample Marketing Plans available for your reading pleasure.
• Hundreds of business plans may be found in the Business Plans Handbook series.
• For a tutorial, refer to How to Write a Marketing Plan.