Research Guides: WRIT 340: Advanced Writing for Business: Discovering Trends

Identifying Business / Consumer Trends

Insider Intelligence (formerly known as eMarketer) This link opens in a new window
Keyword search "trends" to find articles, charts, reports and other content in a a variety of select industries.

Mintel Trend Drivers
Mintel provides consumer insight reports with focus group survey results on many key product and service categories, markets, new products and competitive landscapes. Click on the 'Trend Drivers' tab and the current year for detailed reports on key trends that have been and will impact consumer industries.

Passport This link opens in a new window
Click on the Dashboards tile for high-level trends and industry growth forecasts of consumer industries in an interactive dashboard.
It includes company profiles, some with SWOT analysis, country briefings, sector briefings, sector data, industry watch articles and detailed Consumer Lifestyle reports.
IBISWorld This link opens in a new window
Find industry trends within each report under Industry At a Glance/Key Trends.
Gartner This link opens in a new window
Search for "strategic" predictions or trends to locate technology, software, and AI trends for 2024.
Not all documents are available in full-text form. Use the "Advanced Search" feature to locate full-text articles available to USC users.
Statista This link opens in a new window
Statista is one of the first statistic portals in the world to integrate data on over 80,000 topics from over 18,000 sources onto a single professional platform. Search for "trend" to locate "consumer trend" or "media trend" or "internet trend" or "market trend" or "food trend" reports and data.

These websites can be a good starting point for identifying current business trends for your WRIT 340 assignment. Conduct more intensive research using the "Key Resources" on the first tab (e.g. Insider Intelligence).

Tip: Use the following method for locating additional reports in Google:

filetype:pdf 2024 business trend

allintext:"business trend" 2024

Note: For articles that you can't seem to access in Google or elsewhere on the web, remember that you can always return to the "Articles and News" page to freely access publications like The Economist, Business Insider, Forbes, etc. Also note that online titles tend to differ from digital editions, so it can be helpful to browse by date or search by author to find the article or report you're looking for. When searching for articles, consider adding these words to your search string: Forecast, outlook, future, trend, survey, report.