BUSINESS COURSE GUIDES
SOM210 Lab 2: Locate Journal Articles about Company Market Strategy

The Lab 2 assignment is designed to familiarize you with recent journal articles about your company.  Articles that describe your company's "market position and strategy" will be selected. By reviewing these articles, your team will also become familiar with the variety of business periodicals that report company and market news.

• Locate journal articles about your company in the BCRC database.
• Review and select articles describing your company's market position and strategy.
• Write a one-page description of your company's market position.
• Place links to key articles in Team Work Space. 

UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS JOURNALS

• Several thousand business journals are published--providing comprehensive access to news about companies, industries, and markets worldwide. 
• Business journals are published frequently (i.e., periodically) - either daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
• Business journals are used more than any other source for strategic business information.
• BCRC contains a collection of more than 10 million articles from 1000 business journals (1980 to present). The collection contains several types of business journals:

  Academic Journals: coverage of management research and scholarship. Not a source for business news. For example: Journal of Management Strategy, Accounting Horizons, Environmental Science and Technology.

  Trade Journals: devoted exclusively to providing news about a particular industry. For example: Advertising Age (for advertising  industry); Beverage World (for bottled beverage industry); Amusement Business (for the live entertainment and amusement industry).

National Business Magazines: broad coverage of U.S. and world business news. For example: Business Week Forbes, Fortune.

Regional Business Magazines/Newspapers: coverage of business news for cites, states or metropolitan areas. For example: BusinessWest (for Western Massachusetts business news); Boston Business Journal (for Metro-Boston business news); Texas Business (for State of Texas business news).

Wire Services: Electronic news services that are often the first source of company news and product announcements. For example: Business Wire, Associated Press, PR Newswire.

Here's the complete list of all BCRC journals.

Your team will work from the "Company Profile" page within the BCRC database. All articles about your company are listed under the New/Magazines Tab (at the top of screen). Articles are listed in "reverse chronological order" - the most recent articles are listed first. Some citations do not provide the full text of the article. These citations say "View extended citation" or "View abstract". Please exclude these citations. Select only those citations that say "View text and retrieval choices" - which can be viewed in full text and then posted to Team Work Space.

1. Go to your Lab Team Work Space. Link to your company's profile page in the BCRC database. 
2. At the top of the Company Profile page, click on the News/Magazines Tab to view the list of article citations about your company (sorted in reverse chronological order).
3. Locate articles about your company's market position and strategy by visually scanning through the citation list. Select articles that have the word "market" in the title or other similar phrasing like "expands presence" or "enters market".  Exclude any articles that focus on your companies financial performance (e.g., articles about quarterly earnings). Here is an example from Business Week--How Apple spells future: I-P-O-D.
4. Select at least two articles that discuss your company's market strategy. For each article--move the pointer to the Address Box and highlight the URL (click the right mouse button to highlight). Then press <CTRL> C to copy the URL. 
5. Return to your Team Work Space. Post each marketing article about your company's market strategy to Team Work Space as follows:
   
   
   • Click the NEW button located under the "Add/Update Team Research URLs" heading.
   • Press <CTRL> V to paste the article URL into the Address Box.
   • Go to the Display Name box and carefully compose a citation to the article using the citation format in these two examples:

    

   Liddle, A. (1998, January 5). Eating-place sales projected at $39.94M as the battle for market share heats up. Nation's Restaurant News, 32(1), p42. Retrieved August 30, 2001 from the World Wide Web - Business and Company Resource Center database. 

   Cramer, B. (2001, June 11). Spiegel strategy is heavy on pitch to women. Brandweek, 42(24), p8. Retrieved August 30, 2001 from the World Wide Web - Business and Company Resource Center database. 

6. Click the SAVE button to save the URL and citation in your Team Work Space {Make sure to check the citation for errors and to test the URL address.
7. After posting the URLs for the 2 articles, open a new document in Microsoft Word, and write a one-page report about the market position of your company. This report should be double-spaced, using left and right margins of 1.25 inches, and top and bottom margins of 1 inch. The font for your report should be Times New Roman (12 point). At the very top of your file, list the name of the file on the first line, and Team members on the second line. These 2 lines should be placed against the right margin. The rest of your file should be placed against the left margin.
8. When you finish this one-page report, save it to your diskette in the A: drive. Then, using the Add Document option in your Team Work Space, Add the Word file (see example) with your report to your Team Work Space.