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MARK 1008: Consumer behaviour 

1. What you need to know

This page will assist you to find scholarly information and other resources to support your assessments.

Please see your Course Outline and learnonline site for the full assessment details.

2. Plan your search

Identify the keywords in the question

Once you have identified your keywords, you can consider synonyms, or similar keywords. 

Example:

Synonyms for 'purchaser' Synonyms for 'buyer behaviour' 
customer purchasing behaviour
consumer consumer experience
shopper customer habit

Connect your keywords together

Once you have identified your keywords and found alternative keywords, you need to connect these to put your search together.

Use the following operators (also known as Booleans or connectors) to indicate how you want to search for your keywords:

  • OR: connect similar keywords, e.g.: customer OR consumer
  • AND: connect different keywords, e.g.: consumer AND brand
  • "Quotation marks": Keeping phrases together, e.g.: "buyer behaviour"
  • (Brackets): Group keywords and their alternatives together, e.g.: (customer OR consumer OR purchaser)

For example, a search in the Library Collection for: consumer AND "multi sensory"

Screenshot of Library search bar with search string: consumer AND "multi sensory"

In your results page, use refine my results on the right-hand side of the page to filter your results by date, peer reviewed, etc.

For more tips on how to plan your search, please review these links:

3. Recommended databases

Business Source Ultimate

An essential database, Business Source Ultimate includes information covering all areas of business including marketing, industry reports, market research reports, company profiles, and much more.

Below is an example search in the database for: "consumer behaviour" AND "five senses"

Screenshot of advanced search in Business Source Ultimate. Search string: "consumer behaviour" AND "five senses".

Note: You must be logged in to access resources in Business Source Ultimate. 

Passport GMID

Passport GMID is a global market research database which provides detailed data and insight into consumer and industrial markets and analysis on future trends.

On the search page, you can search for industry, category and geographical data. Remember when searching for a particular product to think about what industry it may be classified into.

Below is an example search of a country report in Passport GMID:

Screenshot of Passport GMID database, highlighting the Cooking ingredients and meals category, within the Food and Nutrition tab, inside the Industries tab in the menu bar.

Explore the Find Information tab in the Marketing Guide for more suggestions of databases and key resources.

4. Scholarly sources

For your assignment you are expected to use scholarly sources, sometimes referred to as peer reviewed. 

Peer review is one accepted measure of quality. So, if you are unsure about the quality of an article, checking whether the journal it was published in is peer reviewed is a good place to start. If the journal is peer reviewed, you can be confident that the article is scholarly. 

Watch the video below to learn about scholarly sources (2 min 22 sec)

5. Report writing

Once you have all your information it is time to put everything together. This video on report writing (2 min 53 sec) will give you some tips:

6. Executive summary

An executive summary is often one of the most read parts of a report.

  • It is a brief summary of the overall report.
  • It appears at the start of the report; however, it should be written last, once the report has been finished.
  • It needs to be concise, providing a commentary on the main points of the report.

Watch LinkedIn Learning videos for tips on writing an executive summary. 

Note: You will need to login using your UniSA credentials to view videos on LinkedIn.

7. Referencing

Managing your references

What do you do with all those references you have found? Use a bibliographic management software to store, organise and cite your references.

There are many free systems available. The Library supports the bibliographic management tool EndNote. For more information see the EndNote guide.