Researching Guidance

Our course Blackboard page has many resources to help students add depth to their business plans through primary and secondary research techniques to garner insight into the customers (market) and the competition (industry).  One of the references used in the course is John Mullins' New Business Roadtest. 

Our clients this semester represent the following industries: Health & Beauty (H&B), Hotel Restaurant Cafe Bare (HORECA), Social Media Consulting (Web2.0), Art Gallery (Creative Community) and Jewelry (Gold Retail, Souvenir).  Its important when researching an industry to get both the macro (world trends) and micro (local competitors, partners, associations) perspective.  I always recommend doing plus searches.  This means simply adding the industry + a key word to a search engine such as Google.  So try your respective industry + association (to result in finding the established industry groups that mandate and track trends) as well as + magazines (which will be a great source of topics facing the industry as whole).  Here is an example:

Social Media Industry + Associations result in some of the following useful resources:
Social Networking and Media Association
Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Social Media Industry + Marketing result in some of the following useful resources:
Social Media Marketing Magazine
Media Post
and how social media is affecting other industries like
QSR (Quick Service Restaurants), as only one example

Social Media + Agencies
Blogger who compiled list of 50 top social media agencies
and ofcourse many individual agencies from around the world
Multinational example
Ignite
KrazyFish

Other words to use as + search key terms are:
+ trends
+ customers
+ best practices
+ competition
+ future
+ news
+ Croatia

Think about what the data you collect says, how to communicate it effectively within your plans like through a table, chart, graph, where it belongs in the business plan and if you need to check through primary research tools if this information is also something the local market relates to.

For primary methods of data collection including observation, data mining, surveys, focus groups or interviews you can refer to:
Entrepreneur Magazine
Know This.com
MarketingProfs

For a overall tutorial on Industry and Marketing Research, this is a comprehensive site.  If you have other suggestions for your colleagues please be sure to leave your comments below.