Marketing, Demographics and Statistics.

Marketing and selling often involves a search for data on consumer behavior, trends and other demographic information. DEMOGRAPHICS are the physicalcharacteristics of a population such as age, sex, marital status,family size, education, geographic location, and occupation.

A brief word about MSA's and DMA's

Often someone looking into a company or industry or who wants to start a business will want to know who the customers are. Or, conversely, they will want to pick a certain geographic area and learn about who lives there--ages, incomes, education, etc. In marketing, these geographic areas are often broken out into areas called MSA's or DMA's, or Metropolitan Statistical Areas or Designated Market Areas:

Metropolitan Statistical Areas

The United States government divides the country into statistical areas. Each of these statistical areas is called an MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area). Each MSA includes the metropolitan city and the surrounding suburban areas as defined by the United States government. MSA markets cover a smaller area than DMA (Designated Market Area) markets

Designated Market Areas

A DMA is a geographical region set up by the A.C. Nielsen Company (of Nielsen ratings fame). The counties that make up a city's television viewing area define a DMA. DMAs are ranked in order by the number of households with televisions. All U.S. counties, except the North Slope of Alaska, fall into a DMA. DMA markets cover a larger area than MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) markets.

Definition Source: Bacon's Media Intelligence Service, http://www.medialistsonline.com/Help_criteria.asp

Some sources will break out data into both DMA's and MSA's, but others will only do one and many, neither. Being aware of the definitions can help you more accurately fulfill your patrons' requests.

Some things to keep in mind when dealing with marketing/demographic questions

· Again, the more narrow/specific the patron gets, the harder it is to track down some of this kind of data, so start broad and try not to limit yourself to only one set age-range or small geographic area or even one product.

· Companies are not required to report their advertising/marketing budgets, but this is a notoriously common question: How much does company x spend (and on what channels--TV, radio, etc.) to advertise product y?

Additional Marketing and Demographics Information Sources

Consumer Behavior/Demographics

Sourcebook of ZIP code demographics (Also Sourcebook America, CD Rom)
In addition to standard demographic data and population changes and projections, this resource provides data broken out by zip codes on total businesses, total employment, spending potential indexes, "dominant lifestyles," and other useful categories.
Check your library or Google title to find a source.

Demographics USA (print)
http://tradedimensions.com/prod_dus.asp

Demographics USA is a directory of consumer data that breaks out, either by zip code or county (there are two separate editions), data like age, sex, ethnicity and in addition include calculations on what they call EBI (Estimated Buying Power) and BPI (Buying Power Index) which essentially show marketers who has money to spend on non-essential items.

American Demographics (journal--not free)
http://www.adage.com/section.cms?sectionId=195

American Demographics used to be a stand-alone journal but is now a part of AdAge magazine. American Demographics contains special reports on the buying habits of Americans and other consumer-related marketing issues.

Lifestyle Market Analyst (from SRDS)
http://www.srds.com/frontMatter/ips/lifestyle/

Lifestyle Market Analyst cross tabulates demographic attributes like age, gender, income, etc., against those groups' likelihood to participate in a variety of activities (what they call "lifestyles"). These lifestyle activities are anything from traveling for business, exercising, hunting, owning a dog, and many others. Data is survey based and broken out by lifestyles (e.g. so you can look up who says they do what) and by geographic area (e.g. so you can see what people like to do in specific areas) and by demographic attributes (e.g. so you can see what women aged 22-35 do compared to men aged 36-45).

New Strategist publishers (print series)
http://www.newstrategist.com/

American Generation Series e.g. Millennials: Americans Born 1977 to 1994
Who's Buying e.g. Who's Buying for Pets
Money Series e.g. Household Spending: Who Spends How Much on What
Consumer Series e.g. American Marketplace: Demographics and Spending Patterns

New Strategist publishes books that focus on various segments United States' consumers. Great for getting quick snapshots of particular demographic groups or spending trends.

American Customer Satisfaction Index (print)
http://www.theacsi.org/

Produced by the University of Michigan's Ross Business School, the ACSI measures 10 economic sectors, 41 industries (including e-commerce and e-business), and more than 200 companies and federal or local government agencies and scores them based on criteria measuring customer satisfaction.

Sales and Marketing Management (journal)
http://www.salesandmarketing.com

Sales and Marketing Management is one of the major trade journals for executives in the sales and marketing field. Each November, they have a special issue which contains retail sales figures and the latest population statistics for every U.S. metropolitan and media market.

Proprietary Data Sources for Consumer Behavior/Demographics

The following section highlights sources that you may more often run across cited in an article that points to some marketing or demographic data than actually search directly yourself. The price tag on most of these products are prohibitive for any public or academic institution to have access to, and if you do manage to get access, most likely all the data you'll be allowed to see will be 3 or 4 years old. Mostly these companies work with other corporations (who pay a pretty penny because truly this is data that really can't be found anywhere else) to help them with their competitive intelligence.

It's good to be aware of these companies, though, if only to be better able to understand what is and isn't available to the average information consumer. Also, by knowing about these companies you can be alert for the clues you can find in the sources you do have access to.

Simmons Study of Media & Markets (Choices III) (CDROM)
http://www.smrb.com/

Based on a broad survey, Simmons' Choices III product provides consumer buying and shopping data on over 8,000 brands in 460 product categories.

MRI (Mediamark Research, Inc.) (CDROM and online)
http://www.mediamark.com/

Mediamark Reporter provides information on demographics, lifestyles, product and brand usage, and advertising media preferences reported by a sample of over 25,000 United States consumers. The version available to libraries (due to pricing) is dated--usually at least 2 or 3 years old, but it is one of the few products within reach that will provide item/brand level sales data.

Global Market Information Database online database from Euromonitor (GMID)
http://www.euromonitor.com/GMID.aspx

GMID cover over 200 countries and products sold there and industries. Market share data for numerous products is covered and quick top level economic data can also be pulled to compare trends across countries and time.

NPD Group
http://www.npd.com/

The NPD Group bills themselves as the "global leader in sales and marketing information." Click on their "Industries" tab to see the various areas of retail they cover. This is a data source you'll often see referred to in specialty trade and industry journals and often you can hit the jackpot by stumbling across some bit of data from them that has been published in an article.

AC Nielsen
http://www2.acnielsen.com/site/index.shtml

AC Nielsen bills themselves as the "world's leading marketing information company." You may have heard of Nielsen families and television ratings...there are also Nielsen families who track all of their purchases with a scanner, which Nielsen then packages into marketing data.
Marketing/Advertising

Ad Age Data Center (online--free registration required)
http://www.adage.com/datacenter.cms

While the free registration doesn't give you full-text access to everything here, it's a handy way to look at the kinds of topics Advertising Age covers and get ideas (especially if you happen to have Advertising Age full text through a database).

Advertising World (free online directory)
http://advertising.utexas.edu/world/

The University of Texas at Austin Department of Advertising has put together this directory of companies and web sites related to anything dealing with Marketing. Its many categories include Package & Logo Design, Children's Advertising, Subliminal Messages and Demographic Information, among others.

MIT's Library Marketing Subject Guides (free online)
http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/subjects/marketing/index.html

A great place to turn to when you're looking for useful resources in the field of Marketing.

Advertising Red Books (print and online)
http://www.redbooks.com

The Advertiser Red Books track companies which spend more than $200,000 annually on advertising and provide some ad spending data, agency and brand data and some other top-level company information. The Agency Red Books contain profiles of over 10,000 advertising agencies and includes a list of the accounts represented by each agency and fields of specialization.

Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) (print and online)
http://www.srds.com/portal/servlet/LoginServlet

SRDS is the leading provider of media rate and data for the advertising industry. It lists advertising rates, editorial or programming content, circulation and other basic information about various advertising media. SRDS also contains selected demographic and market information for metropolitan areas and counties. It consists of separate volumes for radio, television, newspapers, interactive media, consumermagazines, etc.

Ad$pender (online)
http://www.tns-mi.com/prodAdSpender.htm

Ad$spender is one of the few products that tracks advertising spending by both brand and outlet. At one time, print volumes of aggregate data were available for library purchase, although I think this is only available online now. Most likely not going to be found in a library due to its pricetag, but worth knowing about.

Encyclopedia of Advertising (print and online)
http://encyclopedia.adage.com/

The Encyclopedia of Advertising is published by Advertising Age and covers companies, people and concepts associated with marketing.

Companies and their Brands/Brands and their Companies (print)
Not sure who makes Nutella? You can look up the brand in the Brands and their Companies and be pointed to Ferrero USA and then look up Ferrero in Companies and their Brands and see that they also make Ferrero Rocher and Tic-tacs, among other products (who knew?). A handy reference set.
Check your library or Google title to find a source.

Encyclopedia of Consumer Brands (print)
"Approximately 600 of the most popular brands in America" are highlighted in this three-volume set which published in 1994. Vol. I covers Consumable Products, Vol. II covers Personal Products, and Vol. III covers Durable Goods. Some entries are for individual products, such as Twinkies or Scotch Tape, while others are for brand names such as Pillsbury or Sony. Entries include brand history, current (as of 1994) status, current (as of 1994)brand logos or photos, and sources for additional information. There may be a new edition or update in the works set to publish in November 2006 from what I can tell in Bowker's Books In Print. Stay tuned.
Check your library or Google title to find a source.

Trendwatching.com (free online)
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/

This site offers a free monthly newsletter that highlights some of the many trends that this marketing company has identified amongst consumers. Want to know more about Massclusivity or the Insperience trend? While Trendwatching.com might not have the skinny on *every* trend, it's a good site to check for ideas on what's going on in the world of consumer trends and marketing.