Business Administration 162 - Principles of Marketing - Cardona

The purpose of this stepwise assignment is to provide an opportunity to play the role of marketing manager and gain valuable, first-hand experience in writing, organizing, and polishing a marketing plan.

In this third part, you will dig deeper into planning market research and targets. This includes:

• determine how much you know about your customer needs, wants, preferences, attitudes, and buying patterns
• finding data to support your customer research
• what variables to look for based on your customers 

Social Explorer Data Visualization Tool

Social Explorer is a database that gathers thousands of data variables and can create reports and visualizations to support your research need. For this assignment, you can use social explorer to view tables and maps based on marketing variables by year like:

• sex and gender
• family size
• household income
• consumer expenditures
• education
• race
• age
• quality of life such as religion, bargain seekers, amusement, etc.
• veterans
• business count and patterns 

Watch the short video (2:20) on how to map data categories then open the Social Explorer link to start visualizing.

Starting Points for Industry Research:

• Identify the industry or industries your business will be in, then find an industry report for the closest related industry using the NAICS Code.
• If you can't pinpoint an industry, try looking up a company that is similar and see what industries it is in. 
• Looking for a niche industry? Look at broader industries in addition to searching trade publications for articles. 
• When looking for data, consider who might collect that information: Government agencies? Industry associations? Research centers?

From LOC and UNC LibGuide.