Researching company strategies

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Introduction

Audience: This research guide was created to help students with assignments that involve analyzing the strategic positions of companies.

Goal: The main focus of this guide is to highlight a few key databases that are likely to be useful for your assignments, as well as to help you understand what types of information might and might not be published. 

There are, of course, many other databases beyond what's covered in this guide, and no single resource is perfect. We've provided links to other relevant guides, each full of additional sources you could try. Explore further if these first sources don't have what you need!

News

  Businesses and their environments are constantly changing, and any strategic perspective on a company is, by definition, looking forward into a world that is largely unknown.

Many of the sources on this page look backward at what a company has already done. To analyze a firm's strategic position and recommend adjustments, you must also check news sources for a sense of what is changing today and in the near future.

Screen capture of the title slide of video: Actions vs Words: Understanding a Company's Strategies Using News Sources.  Start with Factiva to search in thousands of news publications at once, including many business-focused ones such as the Wall Street Journal and Chain Store Age.

Watch this short video to learn more about the role that news articles play in researching company strategies. Note that the video includes some useful Factiva search tips – be sure to watch all the way to the end!

This blog post also mentions one of the main Factiva search tips: the use of pre-developed "Factiva Expert Searches" to find news about strategic and competitive intelligence topics such as M&A activity and product announcements. Also watch this "3-Minute Tip" video about Factiva to learn about its value as a research tool.

And for still more on the value of news as a powerful business information source (plus to learn about additional news sources), check out this blog post.

Finding in-depth articles on companies

Many business magazines regularly publish in-depth articles on companies. Such articles often combine external & internal facts about a company with analysis & interviews and can be particularly useful. For example, see this article on Nike via Fast Company. One (imperfect) way to find such articles is to focus your search on longer articles. See below for tips on how to do so in both Factiva and Business Source Complete. 

Factiva: Add a "word count" term to your search: WC># (E.g., WC>3000 will find articles longer than 3000 words.) See this annotated screen capture for more details on how to set up such a search or expand the step-by-step instructions below.

View/hide instructions for Factiva
  1. Add a "word count" term to the main search box using the format WC>#.  (E.g., WC>3000.)
  2. Enter the name of your target company in the Company field. If your company isn't listed there, just add it with AND to the search at the top of the screen; e.g., WC>2500 AND Tesla.

Optional (if needed to further focus your results): 

  • Factiva will automatically sort your results with the newest ones at the top, but you could use the Date limits (e.g., "in the last 5 years") to focus on a narrow period, then re-sort your results by relevance to bring the most relevant articles from that specific period to the top of the list.
  • Consider adding a term in the Subject field (esp. "Corporate Strategy/Planning").
  • Consider using the Language field to limit to articles in languages that you are able to read. (Factiva has articles in dozens of languages.)

Business Source Complete: Use the "Number of Pages" search box on the advanced search screen to find longer articles. Again, see this annotated screen capture for more details on how to set up such a search or expand the step-by-step instructions below.

View/hide instructions for Business Source
  1. Enter your target company name in the first search box and change the drop-down box to: "CO Company Entity."
  2. Focus your search on longer articles using the Number of Pages limiter. Choose whatever page length seems to produce the best results for your topic.

Optional (if needed to further focus your results): 

  • Add additional search terms (e.g., strateg* to find strategy, strategic, etc.) in the second and third search boxes at the top of the screen.
  • In the Publication Date field, add a Start year (and/or an End year) if you prefer to see articles from a specific date range.
  • Checking off the Cover Story box is highly likely to get you detailed articles, but this approach may limit your results too much. Consider using the page-number search limiter instead. 

Company information

  It's much simpler to choose publicly traded firms for this sort of assignment as such organizations are far more likely to have at least some information published information about their operations and strategies.

However, even publicly traded firms don't release all of the information you might want (e.g., sales volume and value of a specific brand from a company with thousands of products). Remember that you can often make inferences and estimates based on information about the industry, key competitors, and market/consumer trends.

Not everything you hope to find will be stated explicitly!

Start with the website of your target company. Be sure to look for parts of their site dedicated to investors, prospective employees, and suppliers. Remember, though, that their site will likely only provide information that they either must release because of regulatory requirements (especially financial data) or that they want to release because it serves their purposes.  

 Then check S&P Capital IQ to find financial data, lists of subsidiaries and products, M&A activity, strategic alliances, and much more about both companies and industries. Some of the same information will also be at your target company's site, but S&P extracts such information from many sources, then makes it easy to find and analyse. This screen capture will give you a better sense of the range of information available in "CapIQ."

Watch this "3-Minute Tip" on S&P Capital IQ at SFU, then get into more detail with these videos and browse the guides and tips in S&P's Academic Resource Center  to learn more about the database.

For additional sources with company financials and profiles, see our Company Information research guide.

  Case studies: Teaching cases often provide details that aren't available in other published sources. Our Case Studies guide lists sites, databases, ebooks, and journals that contain such cases.  

Some major suppliers of teaching cases such as Harvard and Ivey only sell their cases to individual students and classes, not to libraries or institutions. For example, see the pricing details listed for Harvard's 2020 "Apple in China and India" case.

For case studies that do not require additional charges, consider searching Sage Business Cases via the SFU Library, starting with the many cases on Strategic Management, Brand Management & Strategy, Strategic Implementation, or Competitive Strategy topics. Here's a sample of what SBC offers: Apple’s Custom Chips: A Genius Decision? (2023).

Industry overviews

  Understanding the industrial context of a company – the major competitors, demand drivers, barriers to entry, degree of consolidation, etc. – is important if you want to understand and affect the position of a company within that industry. 

  Start with IBISWorld Industry Reports for reports on a broad range of industries in Canada, the USA, and China. For example: Commercial Banking in the US.

Be sure to also explore the Canada and US Business Environment Profiles in IBISWorld. These profiles provide insight into the key drivers that have a material affect on the performance of many industries. Topics covered range from exchange rates to crime rates, and in many cases the profiles cover both analysis & forecasts of those business environment factors.

Read this blog post for more on IBISWorld via the SFU Library, and, of course, there's also a "3-Minute Tip" video to introduce you to help you get started quickly with IBISWorld!

For additional sources of this sort, see our research guide to Industry Surveys.

Market analysis & data

  Detailed information on the sales of specific products is very valuable to companies. As a result, it's often either not published, or only available for a high price, or only roughly estimated by outside analysts. 
 
Fortunately, some market research firms sell their data and analysis to academic institutions at a discounted price (see below for one example available to you as SFU students), but you should still expect to have to work with broader or related information in many cases: even the best marketing databases don't cover every topic.

  Start with Passport for information on the markets of FMCGs (fast moving consumer goods) & consumer services in many countries. 

Passport includes data on market sizes, brand shares, distribution methods, and much more. Also search for reports (analysis) on key consumer trends and on company strategies.

For more market data/analysis sources, try our Market Research and International Market Research guides.

Miscellaneous 

  No database will cover everything. There are always going to be gaps. In most such cases, you will need to gather related information on the industry, competitors, trends, etc., then use that information as the foundation for assumptions and estimates. Sometimes, though, even closely related information can be difficult to find.

If you are having trouble filling some of your information gaps, try the database below...

  Statista: A portal that integrates statistics from thousands of sources.

Think of Statista as sort of a Google search engine focused on useful statistics, but without most of the irrelevant hits and ads!

And, like Google, it can be great at unearthing odd stats that you can't find elsewhere. For instance, if you were searching for the population of fish (as pets) in Canada, the closest our Passport database would offer is an estimate of the number of "Other" (non-cat & non-dog) pets, but Statista finds more specific data and displays it in a pre-formatted chart. 

Always follow Statista's links through to the original sources in case they offer additional useful information. For example, the Statista chart I just mentioned on the number of fish kept as pets in Canada came from this report by Euromonitor (the publishers of our Passport database) done for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. 

Statista can also often help you quantify trends (e.g., fintech) or gather deep data on company-specific sales (e.g., Under Armour) or product types (e.g., sportswear).

Want to learn more about Statista? Here are the many blog posts in which I've mentioned it, plus yet another "3-Minute Tip" video to help you get up to speed quickly. (The Statista interface has been updated since that video was recorded, but it will still provide a good sense of what the database can offer.)

Help

You are not alone! Here's a 5-step process to follow if you get stuck.

  1. Re-read your assignment to be sure you understand your instructor's expectations.
  2. Refresh your understanding of this sort of secondary research by watching this short video: Secondary Research for Business Decisions: Foundations for Estimates 
  3. Check for Help functions in each database. 
  4. Use our AskAway chat reference service to ask a librarian questions about research resources and strategies.
  5. Email me with details on what you are hoping to find and where you've been searching, and I'll try to suggest alternative ways to approach the problem. Note that this approach may involve a meeting (online), so may take a few days to arrange. Be sure to try the steps above first.

Final tip! 

Throughout this guide I've mentioned that not all information is publicly available, and that you will often need to make assumptions, estimates, and inferences.  These are not the same as random guesses or uninformed opinions!  You still need to gather the best information you can and use that as a foundation for any analysis and recommendations.

Remember what you learned about the 3 Rs in BUS 360W: using imperfect information in a business decision requires a careful evaluation of the gap between what you found and what you want, and you have to be ready to justify using each piece of imperfect information. These three short videos will provide a good recap of the role of the 3 Rs play in business decisions: 

Evaluating Information for Business Decisions: 

I hope these tips help.  Good luck with your research!

-- Mark

P.S.: This type of research in which you need to piece together bits of information from many sources, often in combination with well-founded estimates, inferences, and assumptions, is not easy, but it's also incredibly realistic. You will almost certainly need to do this sort of thing outside of university. Take this opportunity to practice and learn the skills involved, including critical thinking techniques.  
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Mark Bodnar
Business & Economics Librarian
mbodnar@sfu.ca