Secondary Market Research

Secondary or Syndicated Market Research Sources

Secondary research is conducted on data published previously and usually generated by industry associations, industry analysts or other interested organizations - typically to understand the overall direction of a market. Secondary research typically costs far less than primary research, but seldom comes in a form that precisely meets the needs of a specific company in a market. However secondary research often provides fundamental information that is helpful to understanding the general direction of a market.

US Government Stats

http://factfinder.census.gov: This web site has a wide variety of information about the US, population by states, growth rates, ethnic breakdowns, number of households, demographic profiles by regions and states and e-commerce growth by industries.
www.bea.gov: Economic analysis by industries, income by cities and states, and a lot of other economic white papers and explanation of GDP and it's calculation.
www.irs.ustreas.gov/taxstats/index.html: A great deal of information on the IRS, types of tax filings and instructions on what types of business might consider which forms of organizations might make the most sense.

Industry Info

www.dmoz.org/Business/News_and_Media/By_Industry/: The Open Directory Project has compiled an enormous amount of information by industries. It's a bit of a challenge to navigate but it definitely has an enormous amount of information on the selected industries.
www.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/business/journals/tradejournals.htm: A long list of academic periodicals, and although many require purchases to get the entire article, most give quite good abstracts.

General Business

www.businessweek.com: Great general business website, covers larger and smaller businesses and has interesting editorials. Reasonably good searchability.
www.fortune.com: Good information, aimed more at personal income and investors, although it does drill into a company periodically, and once in a while it performance an analysis on an industry's direction or key players. A close cousin to the Business 2.0 web site.
www.business2.com: Pretty good site, more aimed at Web 2.0, blogging and things like that. Some business profiling information mostly of smaller businesses. A fair amount of investing information. Close cousin to the Fortune web site.
www.inc.com: A great site for smaller businesses or those that are focused on e-commerce. Lots of ads, but I'll forgive them for having some really good articles and writers.
www.redherring.com: A source of technology information and insights into which companies are players and which ones are in the wrong spot at the wrong time. A nice balance of technology product reviews and the companies behind them.

General Interest News

www.newslibrary.com: A wonderful search tool to go through thousands of newspapers for specific articles in only seconds. Advanced search capabilities - a great place to start for anything that may have been written about in a newspaper.

Management Tools

www.ceoexpress.com: A strong search engine that includes a lot of the higher end journals and publications - although if you want the full article you may be asked to buy it. If you're on a budget it's probably not the first stop, but if you need the information enough to pay for it, it just may be able to help out.

Other Options

These are only a small number of thousands of such sites. The standard search engines can also be very helpful depending on what you you're looking for. If you really get stuck you may want to got into the local library also - they have great knowledge that maybe able to help you, and they also have access to databases that we don't.

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Secondary Market Research

Secondary or Syndicated Market Research Sources

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MARKET RESEARCH BLOG

Harvard Business Review had a great review of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Mr. Anderson posits two theories:

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