Project 1 Researching Consumer Buying Behavior MBA 640 Product Line: Designer Jeans
Hi Everyone,
As you begin your research for Project 1 (and for all of our later project papers and discussions that require outside research), you will want to access our UMGC Library and databases so I’ve prepared some guidance here that you might find helpful.
This course does involve quite a bit of reading and research. You may become frustrated early on but you should find it easier once you are familiar with the many resources available.
Please note that projects should be supported by a mix of our course readings , outside scholarly sources (which are journal articles such as Journal of Marketing or Journal of Consumer Research), and reliable outside non-scholarly sources (such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Money, Fortune, Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, morningstar.com , globalEDGE, The Economist, WSJ, and FT).
To look for information about the jeans market in the U.S./Canada, in Germany, and in the UK, the benefits sought in jeans, the frequency and methods of purchasing jeans, the importance of a “designer” label to different cultures, etc., some of the best UMGC Library databases to use are:
1. ABI/INFORM Complete
2. Business Insights: Essentials
3. Business Source Complete
4. Hoovers
5. Nexis Uni
6. Google Scholar
7. Mergent Online
8. S&P NetAdvantage
You will find very few (if any) scholarly sources about consumer behavior with jeans but you may find scholarly sources about differences in geographic areas and clothing purchases or attitudes toward designer labels. Scholarly sources can also be used to support the marketing concepts that you are discussing rather than jeans industry itself.
Below are some quick steps to use in locating sources in the UMUC (UMGC) Library.
Access the UMGC Library by clicking on “Library Services” under the Resources Tab on our Course home page. Then, click on “Databases by Title (A-Z)” to find a list of available databases:
ABI/INFORM Complete is a database that includes all major business sources so this is very useful for MBA 640.
Click on ABI/INFORM Complete to get a search box. Type in your search term(s) and click SEARCH. You may be searching for “Denim Jeans” or “Designer Jeans” or “Designer Jeans in Germany” or “Designer Clothing in European Countries,” for example. Try MANY DIFFERENT SEARCH TERMS if you are not finding what you are looking for right away.
You should click on “Full text” to get the entire article and not just an abstract or brief summary. You may include “Peer reviewed” when you are looking for your two scholarly articles and you may include a date range to narrow your results:
Just as an example, I selected “Tooth Whitening Strips” as a topic, “Full text,” and published after 2008 (to get articles from the last 10 full years) and clicked SEARCH:
The articles returned in the search will be in non-scholarly but reliable sources .
You might search for “Designer Jeans Purchases in the United States,” for example. If you cannot find information specific to some of your questions (such as how often consumers purchase jeans or where they purchase jeans in the U.S.), you may broaden your thinking and search for “Clothing Shopping in the United States” (to see who does the purchasing and how often and where they shop for clothing) and then use that information to make assumptions that jeans are purchased in a similar way.
To search for scholarly articles using ABI INFORM, I indicated “Peer-reviewed” and broadened my search term to “Teeth whitening around the world.”
This results in articles from academic journals, such as this one from the Journal of Consumer Policy. This type of information will be more about marketing concepts such as consumer buying behavior or cultural differences in consumer behavior.
Scan through your results to find any non-scholarly and scholarly articles of use in your research and to help support your points.
The Business Insights: Essentials database gives information that is more specific to companies and industries. You might search here for “Clothing” under the “Industry” category or “Jeans” under the “Keyword” category, for example:
Business Source Complete is another useful database for business research. Here is what that homepage looks like (where you might search for “Jeans Industry”):
The Hoovers database has recently changed its look and is somewhat complicated to use but provides industry news and insights as well as company information. (You may ask a Librarian if you need additional help with this one or send me a text/email and I will try to walk you through it!):
Nexis Uni (which used to be LexisNexis) provides “news” articles as well as some industry and legal articles:
Another database to find scholarly articles is Google Scholar and which includes a typical search bar and you may search for terms such as: “Global perceptions of designer jeans,” for example:
Mergent Online is a great database for company-specific information (so it is not as useful for PROJECT 1, but you may want to use it in upcoming projects—particularly PROJECT 2 and PROJECT 4). You may find some information using the “Industry Analysis” tab and searching for “textiles” (as this would include clothing) and narrow by the geographic regions of interest:
Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage is another database for company-specific information (so you may find useful in upcoming projects):
Hopefully, you find this information useful. Remember, the Word document attached to each weekly announcement provides additional guidance as well.
Let me know if you have any questions/concerns,
Professor Ducoffe