Market share information is rarely easy to find.
A few general tips:
- Try to think of different names that could be used to describe your product (ex running shoes, athletic shoes, athletic footwear, sneakers). Different databases will use different terms so often you will need to repeat your search using more than one.
- If you can't find reports on your specific market, look for reports on more general markets (ex. trail running shoes > running shoes > athletic footwear, etc...). Sometimes even more general reports will contain useful information.
- Market share data is typically for a specific geographic area (ex Canada, North America, Global, etc). If you can't find market share data for the area you are interested in, you may want to try to extrapolate from data for another area.
In other words, in many cases the market share data you do find, if you find any, won't be the exact product or area that you are interested in. This means that you need to use whatever data you can find to project what the marketshare would be, then make a case for how you went about estimating this.
Note: If you are looking for market share for an assignment, you should check with your instructor to see what their expectations are in cases where you can't find specific market share data. Can you use data from other products or areas? How much justification are they expecting?
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The best place to start searching is with the Industry research guide:
- Start in Passport. Search for your industry and country in the top right search box (e.g. beverages Canada). Within the report, scroll to the 'Category data' or 'Market data' section.
- Try the other databases as well: IBISWorld, MarketLine, Mintel. Note that there will likely only be market share information for the largest companies or products.
- If you are researching a technology industry or ecommerce, try eMarketer. Limit to 'charts' or 'reports' in your search results.
- Try Market Share Reporter. Select 'keyword' and 'include current and backfile directories.' Type in your keyword (e.g. pantyhose). This will give you basic market share charts.
- Try Statista.
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Try searching Google using a search like:
coffee "market share" canada filetype:pdf
This can sometimes find useful reports or information, although you usually also have to sort through advertisements from companies trying to sell you reports as well.
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The final option is to search for newspaper, journal, or magazine articles that report on the product/segment you are interested in. To do this search for the name of your product/company + the keywords "market share".
For a list of the best databases to do this, visit: Articles and Newspapers