Rankings & market share -- a starting point...

Looking for quick market share data, or rankings of companies or brands?
A common starting point is to look for a table in one of two annual reference publications -- Business Rankings Annual or Market Share Reporter, both published by Gale.

These publications are also search-able through a database to which USF subscribes, Business and Company Resource Center. Unfortunately, locating these resources may not be obvious. Here's a quick tip:

First, go to the "advanced search" screen and in the drop-down box, change the content area to "rankings". Then, you can search on a keyword such as coffee. You'll be returned a set of documents divided into two groups - click the tabs at the top for "Business Rankings" or "Market Share" to see which documents are available from each of the two publications.

The documents are usually tables which have been extracted from secondary sources, which are also noted. For example, a document entitled "Largest coffee chains, 2006" includes a brief paragraph discussing the summary data from the Specialty Coffee Association of America and a chart ranking the chains by number of outlets (i.e., Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, etc.) - and the source indicated is an article from the Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2006.

There are of course other resources for researching market share -- (such as the database "TableBase" from RDS or market research report collections such as Marketline Information Centre or Minitel) -- but this is another quick and easy starting point (once you know where to look!)...