Situation: 

You're Lee Jheenz, Marketing Manager, Zellers Project, Canada; the Research Department is swamped & tells you to create a Brief for your study, for them to review/refine before issuing an NDA & final Brief to suitable, qualified agencies. Your boss, Ms. May Kitzo, warns you that a major aspect of creating this Brief is to find & summarize substantial Secondary Info on your firm, its brands, the category & segments, typical consumer profile, etc...but also its expected competitors. 

 

Ms. Kitzo expects that depending on the specific TOPIC, the Brief to the Agency might include any parts of, or most of, THIS SECONDARY INFORMATION:

 

 (i) Category definition* & size (units, dollars, transactions) and category size trend (rate of growth decline in dollars or number of visits, etc); *describe size of 'segments' eg of Mass Merch stores in Canada, what % of Sales are 'Discount' stores, how Discount is defined, banners included in segment. 

 

(ii) Consumer Spending Rate: ie $ spend per occasion/transaction/ year (if available)

 

(iii) Current Banners/ Brands and market share & number of outlets & customers if available 

 

(iv) Current Banners' Inventory: Product line description (inventory of different categories offered, private brand names, etc) 

 

(v) Current Customer ratings/reviews (yelp & other sites) of those Direct Competitors 

 

(vi) Our Target: What traits differentiate a Zellers high-value prospect User vs Gen Pop, and a Frequent/Heavy user vs Infrequent/Light user. Use news releases, traits of neighbourhoods where 25 Zellers will be, etc

 

(vii) Your POV - which banner(s) will Zellers compete MOST closely with- in priority order. 

 

(viii) News Articles from different, credible sources on a topic relevant to this situation (see ABI or Business Periodicals). Find & summarize (3 sentences each) stories on challenges/opportunities related to this category/industry (discount retail &/or nostalgia retail &/or 'store within a store' results recaps) NOT including PR communiques / launch announcements. 

 

(ix) web traffic of The Bay, Zellers, Giant Tiger, Dollarama, Joe Fresh, summary of social media presence (urls, hashtags, follower count on IG, fb, twitter,...); you may use a table (*tip: similarweb!). You might consider including relevant industry-average benchmarks (site traffic, demographic strengths, visit frequency, duration, page views, shopping cart abandonment rates) if available