“Where would you find this info?” Question in the Case

Question

Hi, what’s best way to handle the “Where would you find this info?” Question in the Case interview? both BCG and Bain mock interviews included that one on matters of the bakery business or coffee shops.

Google and industry reports (such as from TNT Gallup or Hoovers) is one answer. What else given the time constraint? The interviewer would say you have only 2h to complete the study so polling customers may not work.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Hi,

It really depends on what kind of info you need. To put all the sources in one bucket:

Interviews
Polls
Putting a video camera
Accounting data
CRM data and IT systems
Invoices, etc
Tech specs
Stopwatch measurements
Experts
Benchmarks

Best

Answer 2

Hey there, some potential answers which I have actually used in the past, given the time constraint :

1) Look at internal company database of previous cases

2) email/ask colleagues in office that have worked in this sector who

3) (A bit longer term, but doable in 24 hrs) conduct expert interviews (a tool we use a lot)

4) web scraping - commonly used to analyse customer segments - e.g. looking at linkedin profiles for a market sizing of a company

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

As research will be a thing you do quite a bit, this is an important question to see how creative you are to come up with data sources.

Some less thought of examples could be:

Industry associations and standards bodies member lists (like GSMA or ITU for telecoms)
Registration lists of regulatory authorities (Ofcom for UK telecoms, BNetzA for the German Energy sector etc...)
participant lists for key exhibitions (CES for Consumer Electronics or MWC for mobile)
Research reports (even the table of contents often has a "companies mentioned in this report" section that can tell you quite a bit)
Gartner Magic Quadrants
Expert interviews through AlphaSights or GLG (2 hrs may not be possible)
Your project team's network
And yes... Wikipedia!

And of course, everything that Alessandri said

Answer 4

Vlad, Elias and Alessandro- Thank you very much! For the great inputs!