Notable Ebooks: Who's Buying Series

Finding marketing demographics in a well-organized and tidy form is sometimes a challenge. Although we do have entire databases devoted to demographics, like DemographicsNow, and others that try to collect data on consumption of products in the global community, like Euromonitor's Global Market Information Database (GMID), the fact is that both of these databases have quite a learning curve. And a bit of patience is required to use them effectively. Sometimes, people just want a quick demographics snapshot of this or that, which is why the print resources published by New Strategist have been popular resources with our users since before either of the above mentioned databases existed.

New Strategist publications look at everything from public opinion (American Attitudes) to Household Spending to characteristics of specific generations (e.g., The Millennials). And a few years ago, the company started a "Who's Buying" series of small volumes covering a variety of market segments like apparel, health care, travel and pets. We used to have these volumes only in print form, with the latest editions kept at the Reference Desk. But we recently added several New Strategist publications, including the Who's Buying Series as eBooks in our Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) collection, thus extending where and how our users can access these materials.

You can, of course, simply go to GVRL as a database and plug in a topic. If, for example, I search for fast food restaurants, I'll pull up a great variety of materials. These include industry histories, biographies of business leaders like Dave Thomas (of Wendy's fame) AND sections pulled out of the Who's Buying at Restaurants and Carry-Outs.

In many cases, you'll want to see these other GVRL resources, as well.

However, if you only want the specific Who's Buying guide, one option is to look up the individual volume, like the Pets guide, in the online catalog,


and click on the link to the online version, and then either use the search box to left of the opening eBook screen to search "within this publication" or browse the "eTable of Contents" linked in the middle of the page.

And if you don't know the name of a particular book in the series, simply browse the titles in this series list from the online catalog. (The other option would be to pick to the individual titles from the "Social Science" (!) list on the GVRL opening screen, but this is not the best or easiest way of getting to these volumes.)

As handy as these little guides can be, don't forget to use the other databases we have, which may provide you with more up-to-date or varied information. Besides the ones mentioned in the first paragraph or this blog entry, there are many more linked from our subject database lists and from our many research guides, including ones on marketing and demography.