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Global Business Leadership

Recommended Resources

"Consumer research is done with the intention of understanding the needs or behaviors of a particular group in order to define who to best market a product or service to, also known as identifying a target market" (Burclaff, 2024).

You can group customers by: age/generation, geography, values, lifestyle, and other factors. Attitudes, habits and preferences are generally collected via interviews, surveys, polling, focus groups, and by other means. Ideas for finding information about a specific consumer group:

  • Brainstorm which organizations or businesses might collect the information you are looking for. (Think: government agencies, trade organizations, academic researchers, etc.).
  • Consider: broader terms, rather than sticking to only specifics. (Ex. "Gender" instead of "women").
  • There is plenty of information and data out there that is FREE to access, including via the CSB+SJU databases!
  • Try searching books and journal articles, which often include statistics in the introduction or background information sections.

Consumer demographics can be categorized by:

Burclaff, Natalie. (2024, February 23). Doing Consumer Research: A Resource Guide. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/consumer-research/.

The additional databases and resources below will help you to better understand a customer base:

Book Recommendations for Understanding Consumers

Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

Marketing guru Lindstrom presents the startling findings from his three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy.

Changing the Game for Generation Alpha: Teaching and Raising Young Children in the 21st Century

Changing the Game for Generation Alpha: Teaching and Raising Young Children in the 21st Century

Raising Generation Alpha Kids looks at how this generation of young children presents new opportunities and challenges, and supports and informs the two principal groups of adults in children's lives - their families and early childhood educator.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Empire of Things looks at the history of the growth of consumerism, exposing the international nature of its expansion through the last six hundred years, and the challenges it poses to the planet.

For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be

For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be

In For the Culture, Marcus Collins argues that true cultural engagement is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior. To effectively engage with communities we first need to think hard about what we will contribute to those communities.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents - and What They Mean for America's Future

The United States is currently home to six generations of people: -the Silents, born 1925-1945; -Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964; -Gen X, born 1965-1979; -Millennials, born 1980-1994; -Gen Z, born 1995-2012; -and the still-to-be-named cohorts born after 2012. They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep do they actually run?

InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z

InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z

This book by internationally-acclaimed researcher and speaker Sarah Weise will teach you the new rules for marketing and brand-building for Generation Z. Packed with stories and insights from dozens of youth research projects, you'll find out what you need to know about how this next generation of customers wants to learn, transact, and engage with brands like yours.

Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism

Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism

This book offers an in-depth discussion on the soaring popularity of fan communities and how these followers serve a larger purpose in a consumer-driven society.

Millennial Consumer Trends and Their Impact on the Global Economy

Millennial Consumer Trends and Their Impact on the Global Economy

This book seeks to understand the buying behaviors and behavioral patterns of Millennials as consumers as well as how their preferences have transformed the demand, or lack thereof, of certain goods and strengthened or weakened specific industries.

The Oxford Handbook of Consumption

The Oxford Handbook of Consumption

This book examines the most pressing questions addressed by consumption studies scholars today. The volume counteracts the tendency towards disciplinary myopia as it engages scholars from around the world drawing on sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, consumption studies, and marketing.

Point of Sale: Analyzing Media Retail

Point of Sale: Analyzing Media Retail

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries.