Research, Citation, & Class Guides: Entrepreneurship: Consumer & Market

What Information Should I Look For?

When considering Consumer & Market information, you want to know things like who is your target market? How big is it? How much disposable income do they have? What need do they have that you can fill? How are you going to reach them? (see also the Advertising tab for this)

Use the databases and websites below to help you identify your consumers.

Reference Solutions

Use the database Reference Solutions to build a list of potential customers. Where do they live? What is their average household income? Use the US Consumers / Lifestyles module within Reference Solutions to perform your search.

Alternately, use the US Businesses module to create a company list. These can be lists of business customers if your business is B2B, or suppliers or partners for any type of business.

Use this tutorial for creating a company list:

Using Statista

This video describes how to use the database Statista to find information on consumers, companies, countries, and more.

Using Census Data

Census data is a fantastic resource for local demographic information.

Use the Census Quick Search to do a keyword search, such as number of college students in Wisconsin, or similar. You can also get a profile of any particular community, e.g. Whitewater:

If your business idea is highly dependent on a specific geographic area, check out the Census Business Builder for an interactive, map-based portrayal of much of the same Census data.

Finally, Census Reporter also provides a nice visualization of Census data for a particular geography.

Using Simmons OneView

Simmons Insights is a database which provides detailed information on consumer buying habits, brand preferences, shopping preferences, daily activity, demographic information, and much more. Note, however, that due to the price, our dataset for this is 3 years out of date, which may make it less useful for some areas. Our subscription also only allows 10 users at a time, so if you can't get in, try back again in a few minutes.

If you want some print directions for how to search and interpret Simmons data, see the documents available on the Simmons guide.

Because Simmons is a rather complex database, here are two separate, interactive tutorials to let you practice using its content:

Creating your query and

Understanding your results

Surveys and Opinion Polls

Polling the Nations (Opinion Research Service Publishing)
Restricted to 4 users at a time
Polling the Nations is a compilation of more than 14,000 surveys conducted by more than 700 polling organizations in the United States and more than 80 other countries from 1986 to the present. Search by topic, question, date, geography, organization conducting survey and category of respondents (gender, ethnic groups, etc.).
Pew Internet & American Life Project
"The Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life."
American Customer Satisfaction Index
The only national cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction in the United States. The Index measures the satisfaction of U.S. household consumers with the quality of products and services offered by both foreign and domestic firms with significant share in U.S. markets.

Roper iPoll
Public opinion poll questions and answers on social issues, politics, pop culture, international affairs, science, the environment, and much more. Results from 1935 to the present from academic, commercial and media survey organizations.
Effective May 2020, pre-existing credentials for personal login will not provide access to new Roper iPoll platform. A new account will be required.

Edison Research's Infinite Dial
Provides access to all of Edison's publicly available research including Edison Research's the Infinite Dial® research series which is a survey of digital media consumer behavior since 1998. The formats include digital audio, social media, podcasting, smart speakers, and other media-related technologies.