 Hi, I'm Chad Boninger, Business Librarian at Ohio University Libraries. I make YouTube business research tutorials for my students at my university and beyond. In this video, I'll demonstrate how to use a database called Mintel to find demographics and market research reports for sports fans. Note that our library subscribes a Mintel for students at Ohio University to use. If you aren't affiliated with Ohio University, check with your local library to see if they have access or visit mintel.com for more information. When I first arrive on the homepage of a resource like Mintel or any other database for that matter, I like to first look to see if I can find a way to browse the contents. My reason here is that while there is a search box, and there's clearly one marked right here in the middle of the page, I don't really know the type of content nor the scope of the coverage that I might be searching for. Also, databases and search engines will only retrieve articles and reports for the words that you type in the search box. Sometimes the search terms we have in our head don't exactly match what the database uses. For example, you'll see that a search for e-sports, that's e-hyphen sports in this particular example, doesn't immediately match any titles in Mintel for reports. However, if we search for e-sports without the hyphen, we do see the suggested titles here bring up the e-sports US 2021 report. Sorry for that rather long-winded explanation, but I really do believe browsing is an important skill for researchers to have. It can really save you a lot of time and ease a lot of frustration in doing your research. Now that we know how important it is to start with browsing, let's first go to category and then try to see if there is a sports category. Because sports is a leisure and entertainment activity, let's try there. After enough, we find sports nested under a travel, leisure, and entertainment category. Just select the sports subcategory to load all relevant sports reports and articles. So if you like the rap or Curtis Blow, basketball might be your favorite sport and you might like the way to dribble up and down the court, so I'll tell you what, let's go look in that report. On the report page, there are multiple ways to access the content. First, we can click on the full report link to download the full PDF report, right in the center of the page. These reports are typically huge at around 70 pages or more and have an enormous amount of content. If you'd rather browse to a specific section of the report, you can do that on the report home page. Just scroll down until you get to the report content. Here we have an overview. We have information about the market. You'll see things like the basketball landscape or market factors and market opportunities. We have information about the consumers, including exploring basketball fans. We've got information about brands and companies, things like what's working and what's not. And finally, we have the data section. Let's look at a sample of information we can find in Mintel and we'll first we'll go to the consumer section and let's look at exploring basketball fans. So this is a good example of the type of content you can find in Mintel. I really appreciate that Mintel offers both written analysis and some data in their report so it can really appeal to a variety of people doing research and different types of learners. There's a huge amount of content in these reports. You want to give yourself plenty of time to fully explore the content in the reports. I really do believe these reports can really elevate your sports research. I'd also encourage you to visit the data sources section of the report. Here you'll find the data sources the Mintel analysts consulted when they wrote the report. You can also learn a little bit about the methodology of how Mintel collected the data. In this case, we see that the data is based on survey results from a sample of 2,000 adults who use the internet. Speaking of data, another key component of the Mintel reports is the interactive data book. This is where you can create custom charts and graphs with the data from the report. Let's explore the basketball behaviors data using the drop-down menu to see an example of this data in action. Here we see data on how likely basketball fans are to engage in certain behaviors. We can use the link at the top of the page to toggle between graph to table view. The data can be downloaded for you to put in your presentations and papers for your class project. If you want to explore the basketball behaviors of fans further, we can click the button on the right to explore demographics. Here you can dive much deeper into the demographics of fans who align with particular behaviors. You can change the demographic criteria to create a custom table using the drop-down menu to select your demographic criteria. Likewise, you can also toggle between tables and graphs depending on how you want to view the data using the links at the top of the page. I also want to point out that the sports reports aren't the only reports that will be useful to sports researchers. There are tons of reports about consumers and customers for a variety of product categories. These would be especially useful for sports sponsorship projects. As an example, if you are researching the potential of automobile sponsors, you can look at those reports to learn about buying behaviors and demographics of automobile consumers. We can also use reports for specific demographic groups in Mintel. For example, here we find reports on marketing to Gen X. The point here is that you can use Mintel to understand many different aspects of sports fans and consumers and customers of particular consumer products. You just need to think creatively and broadly about how you can use the information to really understand your target sports consumer and sports fan while also elevating your sports research project. I hope you found this video useful and you learned how to use Mintel to find information and market research reports about sports fans as well as other relevant market research reports. I wish you the best of luck in your future research.