Trade Associations and Business Publications

Chapter 9:The Business You're In - Page 9.10

Trade Associations and Business Publications

Trade Associations

Many industries are blessed with an active trade association that serves as a vital source of industry-specific information. Such associations regularly publish member directories and the better ones publish statistical information that track industry sales, profits, economic trends, etc.

If you don't know which trade associations apply to your industry, find out. Search the Internet with Yahoo!, Google, and other search engines. Look for the website of the trade association for your industry. Ask at the reference section of your library for listings of industry associations. Ask someone else in the same industry. Consult an industry-specific magazine. Look in the Readers' Guide to Periodicals Index or the Business Periodicals Index or Ayer's Directory, which lists periodicals.

As a specific example, since we mentioned a hypothetical shoe store, the National Shoe Retailers Association publishes a biennial Business Performance Report, a statistical review of more than 1,700 independent shoe retail companies. They sell it for $50 to members, or $100 to non-members. It covers men's, women's, children's, and family shoe companies, and includes standard financials, statistics, and other information.

Business Publications

Business magazines are an important source of business information. Aside from the major general-interest business publications such as Business Week, Wall Street Journal, etc., there are many specialty publications that look at specific industries.

Specialization is an important trend in the publishing business. Dingbats and Widgets may be boring to the general public, but they are exciting to Dingbat and Widget manufacturers who read about them regularly in their specialized magazines. The magazines are an important medium for industry-specific advertising, which is important to readers as well as advertisers.

The editorial staffs of these magazines have to fill the space between the ads. They do that by publishing as much industry-specific information as they can find, including statistics, forecasts, and industry profiles. Paging through one of these magazines can sometimes produce a great deal of business forecasting and economic information.

Several good reference sources list magazines, journals, and other publications. They also offer indices to published articles, which you can use to search for the exact references you need. These will be kept in the reference section of most libraries:

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature indexes popular magazines. It is published by H.W. Wilson of New York, www.hwwilson.com. Hard copies are available in most library reference sections, but the website is more immediate.
Business Periodicals Index, also published by H.W. Wilson of New York. Indexes business magazines and journals only.

Use the indices to identify published information that might help your business plan. When you find an index listing for an article that forecasts your industry or talks about industry economics or trends, jot down basic information on the publication and ask the library for a copy of the publication.

Reference Libraries

Reference librarians follow reference sources as a profession. They are excellent sources of good advice and tips on reference materials that may help you acquire the information your business plan requires.

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