Resources of the Week
Business Research
Trip’s Lists Vol. 2
Note: Trip Wyckoff is the proprietor of SpecialIssues.com, a database containing information about salary surveys, industry outlooks, overviews, buyers guides, who’s who registers, etc., that can be found in more than 3,200 publications. He is also the current compiler of Price’s Lists of Lists, a resource I started about six years ago. It offers direct links to company and industry rankings. The LOL is available for free. From time-to time Trip posts interesting compilations of useful resources to ResourceShelf. His first compilation was posted about four months ago and is available here.

Buyers Guides
By Trip Wykoff
In this article, we take a look at the different types of buyers guides and the resources affiliated with them. Many magazines now have a buyers guide issue or products area on their websites. Buyers guides are advertising revenue-generating devices magazines use to do one or more of the following: 1) generate incremental income from their advertisers; or 2) reward advertisers; and/or 3) create a tool for identifying future advertisers and subscribers.

Buyers guides can be very useful for identifying companies, especially large companies that play in many niche industries. They can also help researchers understand players in an industry, understand market share and identify niche players in industries. Let’s take General Electric (GE), a large conglomerate, as an example. Below are listed nine different buyers guides; GE has a listing in each.

+ BioIT World
(GE Biosciences)

+ Business Finance Magazine
(GE Finance is listed.)

+ Door & Window Maker
(See GE Plastics profile.)

+ Food & Drug Packaging
(Look for GE Interlogix.)

+ Food Manufacturing
(GE Silicones, GE Water Systems are among the divisions listed.)

+ Medical Dealer
(GE is listed in the Manufacturers Directory; note how small the listing is, probably due to market share)

+ Plastics News
(GE has a large presence, no less than 3 divisions and 2 subsidiaries.)

+ Security Management
(GE Security has a listing; including regional distributors.)
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Trip’s Cool Buyers Guides
+ DM News
(guide to direct mail lists; can sort lists by NAICS code)

+ Quirk’s Marketing Research Review
(wonderful site for tips on researching markets)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2004 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.