Methodology step by step : How to find out Automotive market reports n the Internet without Reportlinker.com

Nicolas — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:51:00 +0200

As explained we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Information Show in December. We will present you a methodology step by step to identify Automotive market research on the European Market, without using Reportlinker.com

1/ Identify who can produce information you are looking for

You have two different ways to begin your search :

if you know the type of information you are looking for (company, country or industry), just refer to the chapter 1C of the present paper
if you prefer to search directly by country, then I advise you to use the Statbel website (http://statbel.fgov.be/port/cou_en.asp). Statbel is the main official statistical institution in Belgium and offers a detailed directory of websites giving figures and facts about every country in the world.

2/ Let the web inspire your industry keywords list

Where can you find market research vocabulary ? Inside market publications of course !

You can use any news aggregator, such as Google news, launch the query “Automotive market”, and read the first articles. I extracted on the first article I found the following keywords :

car sales
new passenger cars
Volkswagen
passenger market
Light Commercial Vehicle segment
new car market

You can also use any market research aggregator like Allbizreport and look into the table of content made of keywords you can use.

3/ The three most important components of your query to identify Market Research

Three elements compose the semantic of any market research :

the industry keywords
the geographical keywords
the dates

Thus, using the first keyword we identified previously, here is the query you will be launching : “car sales” + “Western Europe” + 2007

4/ Type a query and limit it to file format

The best thing to do is to begin by limiting search to a specific file format. That can help you to easily identify who is publishing documents answering your question.

In our case, we posted the following query to Google (05/09/07)

“car sales” + Western Europe + 2007 europe filetype:pdf

5/ Type a query and limit it to one domain

Obviously, the first results are coming from a website publishing regularly information on the European Automotive Market. To be more efficient, it is possible to limit your searches to this website, by typing the following query :

“car sales” + Western Europe + 2007 europe filetype:pdf site:www.acea.be

You will get here 5 results. Among them you will find the 2006 European Automotive Industry Report and 2007 first semester statistics by market and manufacturer.

6/ Relaunch your query with a new keyword

Now that you have information on sales, you can begin to search for information on player’s strategy

The best source for that is definitely the annual report (See chapter 1C).

To quickly get the best page, just type a query such as

"VOLKSWAGEN AG" "investor relations"

You are redirected to : http://www.volkswagenag.com/vwag/vwcorp/content/en/investor_relations.html

Now you can play in limiting your queries to this specific domain, as for example :

site:http://www.volkswagenag.com strategy 2007 filetype:pdf

In that case, the first two results are presentations made during “The Detroit Auto Show” and a Deutsche Bank conference. Each of them gives insight into the group global strategy, roadmap for the group objectives and outlook by market.

Advantages and Limits of business information research through general search engine

Information professional can gain time in several steps of the methodology we presented in this chapter.

In querying a single source of data, and using filters dedicated to the industry they are studying
In assessing the content they identify, through sources certifying the type of content they will find

The very last Vertical Search Engine, also called “Web 3.0” can help them to spare time, and assure the same level of information. We will present you now how this search engines are querying the web database to bring users the very best public content available.

Reportlinker's blog : Web 3.0, Vertical Search, Information Industry and Market Research News - Tag - public content

Methodology step by step : How to find out Automotive market reports n the Internet without Reportlinker.com