Market Research - The Commuter Bar

Premise

Your company has developed a food bar that capitalizes on recent discoveries about "brain foods" like Omega-3 fatty acids. Made with flax seed and pulped sardines, with ginseng and caffeine for an added energy boost, this food bar can serve as a nutritional snack or a total meal replacement.

Your job is to research the market for cereal bars, energy bars, and breakfast bars to better understand how to position your food bar, identify, and reach a target demographic.

Preliminary Discussion

Students can be better engaged if the librarian introduces the premise using recent news stories or images, or by playing off the fishy ingredients of the food bar. The librarian should lead a discussion in which students enumerate the kinds of information they believe would be useful in addressing the case.

This case provides an opportunity to educate students about the cost of secondary market research. A Google search for market research on any given topic typically reveals a number of market research reports available for purchase at prices as high as several thousand dollars. However, there is a large amount of information freely available on the Internet through government agencies and other sources. Students can brainstorm the types of data that would help Herb write a convincing business plan and decide where to locate his store. The librarian can point out which of those data are available from free sources.

First Resource

Students will likely identify demographics as one factor in the decision about where Herb should locate his store. The librarian can demonstrate American Factfinder on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website (http://factfinder.census.gov/) as a source for demographic data. Students may have identified young people as the target demographic, and they can now spend several minutes using American Factfinder to determine which city—Boston or Miami—has a higher population of young people and to identify possible reasons for this trend. The exercise may surprise some students: in 2006 37% of Boston’s population was 15 to 34 years old, compared to 26% of Miami’s, which is likely related to the fact that 13% of Boston’s population are college or graduate students, compared to 5% of Miami’s population. Unexpected discoveries like this reward students’ efforts and engage their interest.

Second Resource

Knowing how much money people spend on comic books would help Herb build a business plan to impress potential investors or lenders. A good source for consumer spending data is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey (http://www.bls.gov/cex/). Unfortunately, the data is insufficiently granular to address a niche category like comic books. This provides an opportunity for the librarian to discuss strategies for coping with such obstacles when conducting research. Students can then spend time exploring the Consumer Expenditure Survey or the American Time Use Survey (http://www.bls.gov/tus/) for information that, while not specific to comic books, might nevertheless prove useful. One or two students can present what they find and explain its relevance.

Third Resource (Optional)

"Herb also wonders whether creating a website for his store is worth the expense."

Free sources of relevant information might include E-commerce statistics from the Census Bureau’s E-Stats site (http://www.census.gov/eos/www/ebusiness614.htm) or data and reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/). After selecting and demonstrating a resource, students should be allowed time to explore it for relevant information, followed by one or two students presenting their opinions.

Wrap Up

While the challenges presented by this case cannot be resolved in an hour-long session, it is important to remember that the purpose of using case studies in library instruction is not to discover a correct answer for the case but to discover principles of information literacy and learn research strategies. A review of the resources covered and the types of information they offer provides an opportunity to underscore these learning outcomes.

Submitted By

Andy Spackman, MBA, MLS
Business and Economics Librarian

1522 Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602

(801) 422-3924
andy_spackman@byu.edu
http://www.lib.byu.edu/business/

Originally Submitted: February 13, 2009

• A copy of the handout created to accompany this case as conducted at Brigham Young University in January 2009 can be downloaded here.