Market Research

Find Business, Company Listings and Directories

In this section KnowThis.com provides listings of directories containing information on thousands of companies throughout the world. Use information in this section for finding companies within an particular industry or for learning more about a company, its products or a firm's management team.

The Weblinks Collection

AnyWho *AT&T offers a full-featured searchable site for locating businesses that includes: finding corporate toll-free telephone numbers, yellow and white pages listings, a reverse lookup where the service displays the person or organization associated with an entered phone number, and links to international phone directories.
EDGAR Database *The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system is operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and tracks reports submitted to the SEC by publicly traded companies.
Hoover's Online *Provides profiles, financial data and other information on thousands of companies. Some information is free, including basic company profiles while more in-depth material requires a subscription. Also, for those researching industry or company history there is an archive of defunct companies that Hoovers once covered but have either been bought out or have closed their doors. Unfortunately, this Business Boneyard feature is not easy to access and only available if the company name is known.
Kompass *International company/product database that claims listing and financial information for nearly 2 million companies in more than 70 countries. However, to use this effectively searchers will need to access the Advance Search feature, which requires a subscription.
MNI Guide to U.S. Manufacturers *Provides information on over 600,000 mostly B-to-B US manufacturers, wholesaler, and business services. Searchable by product type, company name or brand name. But be aware that coverage is limited with many companies, and especially brand names, not represented here.
Open Directory Project *The Open Directory Project consists of a loosely knit group of "editors" who volunteer their time to build what has amounted to the largest human-created, freely accessible directory of websites. For business research it holds great value for locating competitors within an industry since searching using a product or industry keyword often produces a list of categories containing the keyword. Clicking on a few categories may produce listings of potential product or service providers.
Superpages *Provides an easy to use directory for locating businesses including nice feature that allows for searching within a certain distance from any point.
ThomasNet *Better known as Thomas Register, the leading directory of American manufacturers whose green books are found in many libraries, this site allows users to locate company informtion for hundreds of thousands of companies in over 65,000 categories. While results are somewhat limited, often only the company name and address, the scope of included companies is impressive. Also, Thomas provides information on international suppliers from 26 countries through its Thomas Global Register though must register (free) to access search results.

Finding Secondary Research Tutorial
Locating good research is often difficult. Find useful sources in the Finding Secondary Research section of our highly detailed Principles of Marketing tutorial. Click Here for Tutorial