Research Guides: Business Strategy and Competitive Analysis Capstone: Market and Industry Data

Data sets

Free datasets can be challenging to find. You will often need to do quite a bit of searching to find the one that's right for you. These are links to sources for quality data that may be free.

Most of these data sets come in comma delimited (csv) or tab delimited (tsv). Both of these can be imported into Excel, SPSS, or whatever statistical analysis tool you're using.

Data.gov
You can search and browse thousands of publicly available datasets from federal, state, and local governments in the United States.
Data USA
Data USA collects and displays data primarily from the federal government. They generate very nice graphs and visualizations, and each one has a "View Data" button above it that allows you to download the data that generated the visualization.
FRED
The St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve collects economic data and allows anyone to download it. The data is presented in graphs, look for the "Download" button at the upper right of the graph.
Google Dataset search
This is an experimental project from Google for finding datasets. Often you will find that they are for sale, not free.

Market and Industry Reports

The following websites are from U.S. Federal and international organizations that provide data and statistics related to the national and global economy and markets.

Business Strategies | Rand Corporation
Rand conducts research and provides analysis on topics that impact business strategies.
Market Research and Competitive Analysis | Small Business Association
This website from the Small Business Association provides potential business owners with resources for finding statistics related to consumer, economic, income, and production data.
MarketWatch
MarketWatch provides the latest news and updates related to the stock market and other areas of finance and economics.
OECD: Economy | The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
OECD researches and profiles the economic conditions for the major world economies.
Research and Reports | Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) researches consumer economic behavior in addition to promoting consumer education and protecting consumers against unfair practices. Information available includes credit card purchasing behavior, mortgages, identity theft, and other topics.
S&P Global Research and Insights
S&P Global Research and Insights provides reports about the economic, trade, and, market conditions in the world's leading economies.
Trade Data Analysis | International Trade Administration
This US government website provides information about the national and international trade markets.

Market Trends

There are several companies that research market trends. Below are resources from the top market research consulting firms.

Featured Insights | McKinsey & Co
McKinsey explores the connections between business and technology. Topics include leadership, AI, hiring, managing, trade, and markets.
Gartner for Marketing Leaders
The definitive source for marketing leaders of insights, guidance and tools on marketing leadership, strategy, operations, and other areas.
Google Trends
Google Trends provides search data by region and country. Use the search to discover what consumers are interested in and how your business can support that.
TrendWatching
Trend Watching explores consumer trends and other information that can impact business strategies. This is a freemium website which means that some materials will be available to paid subscribers only.