Research Guides: Evaluating Entrepreneurial Technologies: Market Research: Consumer Markets

Consumer Research Databases

Mintel Academic This link opens in a new window
Mintel Reports offers 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. Complex demographic issues are broken into easy-to-understand sections, explaining consumer behavior and demonstrating the structure of the market.
Industries covered include:
Automotive
Beauty
Consumer Electronics
Digital Media
Drink
Financial Services
Food
Foodservice
Health & Wellness
Household
Personal Care
Packaging
Retail
Sport & Entertainment Travel & Tourism

Tutorials:
Interactive Databook Training (10:39)
A 10-minute tutorial video on how to navigate Interactive Databook, how to explore demographics, and customize your own consumer data report.

Abbreviation: mintel
Vendor: Mintel International Group
Coverage: 2001–Current
Subjects: Business, Communication, Hospitality, Marketing
Type: Datasets / Statistics, Reports
MRI Simmons Catalyst (20 concurrent user limit) This link opens in a new window
MRI Simmons Catalyst is a consumer intelligence and discovery platform that provides information on consumer behaviors, brand consumer messaging, cross-channel marketing, and media planning tactics.
Tutorials:
Introducing Simmons Insights (4:52)

Abbreviation: insi
Vendor: MRI Simmons
Subjects: Business, Communication, Demography and Population Studies, Marketing
Type: Datasets / Statistics

Demographics

Census Business Builder
Small Business Edition is built primarily for small business owners who need key data for their business plan or to better understand their potential market. It presents data for a single type of business and geography at a time.
American Factfinder
American FactFinder provides access to data about the United States, and comes from several censuses and surveys including: American Housing Survey, Economic Census, Survey of Business Owners, NAICS codes, Census of Population, etc.

Statistical Abstract of the United States This link opens in a new window
The ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political and economic conditions of the United States.
Tutorials:
Statistical Abstract of the U.S. ProQuest LibGuide

Abbreviation: saus
Vendor: ProQuest
Coverage: 1973–Current
Subjects: Demography and Population Studies, Public Health, Statistics, Urban and Regional Planning
Type: Datasets / Statistics

U.S. Census Data
The U.S. Census conducts hundreds of demographic and economic surveys. Data from the following surveys and censuses are available via the U.S. Census portal, American FactFinder: The Decennial Census, The American Community Survey, The Puerto Rico Community Survey, The Economic Census, The Population Estimates Program, Annual Survey of Manufactures, County Business Patterns, etc.
Pew Social and Demographic Trends
"The Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project studies behaviors and attitudes of Americans in key realms of their lives, including family, community, health, finance, work and leisure. The project explores these topics by combining original public opinion survey research with social, economic and demographic data analysis."

Articles

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Business Source Complete is the world's definitive scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full-text content. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database. Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Complete is the overwhelmingly superior database for full-text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full-text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
Abbreviation: bscomp
Vendor: EBSCO
Coverage: 1886–Current
Subjects: Business, Business Legal Studies, Communication, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Hospitality, Insurance, Management & Strategy, Marketing, Real Estate, Retail Entrepreneurship, Sport Management, Urban and Regional Planning
Type: Datasets / Statistics, E-Book Collections, E-Journal Collections, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries, Proceedings, Reports
ABI/INFORM Global This link opens in a new window
ABI/INFORM Global connects business researchers with more of the scholarly information that they need. ABI/INFORM Global contains the full text of thousands of journals, including essential scholarly journals and the most important trade journals. Researchers increasingly need more than just scholarly journals to conduct their research thoroughly and effectively. This is why we have made it easy for them to access thousands of dissertations, working papers, reports, news sources, and much more.
Subjects include:
Business
Economic conditions
Corporate strategies
Management theory
Management techniques
Business trends
Competitive landscape and product information
Accounting
Finance

Set up a My Research Account in ProQuest to save documents, searches, alerts and more (go to the top right corner of any ProQuest database).

Abbreviation: abi-global
Vendor: ProQuest
Subjects: Accounting, Business, Business Legal Studies, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Insurance, Management & Strategy, Marketing, MIS: Management Information Systems, Real Estate, Risk Management
Type: Indexes / Catalogs

Consumer Expenditures

Consumer Expenditure Surveys
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), provides expenditure data organized by various demographic characteristics such as age, family size, race, income, etc. Data provided back to 1984.
National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC)
NADAC data can be searched for research that has been conducted about the arts and culture in the United States. People can view all studies or search by topic to get a list of studies available through NADAC and read about them.

Attitudes & Opinions

Ipsos Polls
Ipsos polls cover both consumer attitudes and social issues.
Gallup Organization
Analytics and advice about the attitudes and behaviors of employees, customers, students and citizens.
Harris Poll
Frequent polls into a representative sample of Americans of all ages, genders, income and ethnic backgrounds reflecting Americans’ opinions on a wide range of topics and a diverse portfolio of proprietary client solutions to anchor and propel communications campaigns.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) This link opens in a new window
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction.

If you receive an error about not being able to access this database because of using a proxy server, please go straight to https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ then create an account using the link in the upper right to access their site from anywhere. Please use your FSU credentials for the account. If you receive an error about not being from a member institution, submit a request for validation by sending an email to icpsr-help@umich.edu and include your name, your institutional email address, and the name of your institution.
Abbreviation: icpsr
Vendor: University of Michigan
Coverage: 1962–Current
Subjects: Anthropology, Communication, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Demography and Population Studies, Economics, Human Development & Family Science, Geography, Information Studies, International Affairs, Law, Political Science, Psychology, Public Administration and Policy, Public Safety and Security, Retail Entrepreneurship, Social Work, Sociology, Urban and Regional Planning
Type: Datasets / Statistics

Pew Research Center
Pew research projects include: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Project for Excellence in Journalism, Pew Internet & American Life Project, and Social & Demographic Trends.
iPOLL Databank (Roper Center)
(1935 - present)
IPOLL, from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, is a full text database of 500,000 questions from national public opinion surveys since 1935 and updated daily. iPOLL includes survey results data.