Bartley Business Information Center

Survey of Consumers  -  Free from the University of Michigan

For the next three weeks we are testing 2 databases provided by the EIU: Country Reports / Profiles and the Market Indicators / Forecasts.

While on campus you should be able to access the EIU’s Country Profiles and Country Reports (http://portal.eiu.com/) as well as their market indicators and forecasts (http://www.alacra.com/eiu).

If prompted to login, look for the phrase “Enterprise Client Login”, and again, this will only work on campus.

I have found industry reports in Business Source Premier, Marketline, and Market Insight. MarketResearch.com Academic (via the library page) has some material as well. Also, the US Government offers this link on the Auto Industry.

Euromonitor has some statistical data, as does Mergent, Valueline, and Morningstar. The last 3 are best searched by ticker symbol.

An 1102 student has made the following suggestions for using AliBaba for getting manufacturing costs, I will summarize below:

• AliBaba is probably the most useful tool we as a group have come across as of yet.  There are so many more companies there than on Thomas Register.

• I would suggest not using your cellphone _*number like I have because I have probably received 15-20 phone calls from Vietnam / China / Los Angeles in the past 36 hours.

These were not made by companies I contacted but by others trying to sell their services to me.

• *_TradeManager, AliBaba’s instant messaging service works great_*.  If you leave it open, you will find that as long as you describe what you are looking for in your profile and correctly select an appropriate industry, even people that you have not contacted will message you and try to offer their services.

• It worked best to use the Contact Now option on AliBaba and send an email first,_ then the people working for those companies will promptly respond.  The only downside is that this primarily happens around 8-12 at night because of the time difference since these are primarily Chinese companies.  Try not to be too specific because a lot of things you say get lost in translation, and regardless of whether or not the company can offer you exactly what you are looking for, they will respond.

• Once you get them on TradeManager though, you will be able to find out specifically.

For a challenging and insightful viewpoint weighing the consumers right to make informed choices and government interest in protecting public health, read VSB Prof. Michael L. Capellas’ article on The de-marketing of smokeless tobacco for harm reduction published in the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

I found a marketing report in Business Insight that many business students may find useful:

“Identifying the Health Conscious Consumer: Targeting strategies for image-conscious, ethical workaholics”.

Let me know if you can’t this same report and I can have it sent to you.

Dennis Lambert and Merrill Stein will begin holding office hours in Bartley #2008 on March 19th from 9am to 5pm. Use their schedulers to book appointments or feel free to drop in. Also, note that we now offer Friday office hours from 9-5pm. Thanks and welcome to Merrill and Dennis.

The Villanova School of Business is now ranked 12th according to Business Week.

In addition to our full text holdings in ABI/Inform and Lexis-Nexis, students can now read the paper copy of Financial Times and access both the digital version of the paper as well as all contact on FT.com by following this link provided by the college of Arts and Sciences.

http://www.villanova.edu/artsci/college/academics/financial_times.htm

Falvey Library is pleased to announce the addition of the online version the Mergent / Moody’s Corporate Manuals online.

Mergent WebReports