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 provides an opportunity to discuss the distinction between primary and secondary research, and the kinds of information the library can provide and that are freely available on the Internet.

First Resource

To position this product students will need to understand consumer attitudes toward food bars. Primary research might be the best way to obtain rich data directly relevant to this product, but conducting such surveys and focus groups is expensive. Secondary sources, like those the library provides, can serve as an alternative or supplement. In particular, an increasing number of publishers of market research reports are making their products available to libraries. A prepackaged report from a source like Mintel, MarketResearch.com Academic, or the free reports available from the U.S. Commercial Service Market Research Library (http://www.buyusainfo.net/adsearch.cfm?search_type=int&loadnav=no) can provide deep insight into a market.

During a demonstration of such a resource the librarian can impart elements of information literacy that are specific to this context, including: the need to consider how current information in a particular market research report,

Third Resource (Optional)

American Factfinder on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website (http://factfinder.census.gov/) 

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.