Vividata: New & Improved! (with practice questions)

Do you need to know...

• which brands of energy drinks are purchased most often by young Canadians?
• which Canadian magazines are read most by people who report having donated in the past year?
• how many Canadians take multivitamins?
• which major brands of beer Canadian women buy most often?
• how opinions about global warming vary between consumers of different products?

If so, then the new version of our Vividata database may be of interest!

Vividata Target Snapshot is substantially different from the previous version of the database.  In fact, it's probably best to think of it as an entirely new database... with a different mix of products and brands covered, and some powerful new functionality.  

Biggest benefits of this new version: 

• Colourful bar charts for easy visualization of variations! 
  Major variations between targets (brands, media, etc.) or demographic categories are much easier to spot in the new colourful bar charts. Power users of the old interface may miss the ability to glance at a dense table and get the whole picture at once, but for most folks the bar charts are likely to be far more intuitive. (And you can still get to detailed tables by exporting the excel files that underlie the bar charts.) 
    
• Cross tabulation!
  Rather than having to first find demographic characteristics (age, income, etc.) of consumers of product A, then find the same sorts of characteristics for the consumers of product or media B, then desperately look for enough similarities to argue that product A consumers are also likely to be product/media B consumers... you can now do basic cross tabulation between various magazines, newspapers, product types, brands, and even opinions on major issues -- essentially slicing and dicing the data to get closer to the specific mix of variables you really care about.

As with most complex databases, the best way to learn it is probably to just dive in.  If you like to "explore with purpose," try some of these Practice Questions that we've prepared -- complete with answers so that you can tell if you're doing it right!

Questions?  Send them my way!

-- MarkB
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Mark Bodnar
Business & Economics Librarian
mbodnar@sfu.ca