Skip to Main Content
Libraries Indiana University Bloomington

AMA 2024-2025 Marketing Case Competition

Company and Industry Research

Some notes about Canva and other Competitors
Canva, perhaps the closest competitor to AE, is a private company. As a result, there is not a lot of available analysis or financials for the company. The company is officially known as Canva US and is located in Austin, TX, with operations in Australia, Germany, Philippines and Hong Kong. You can get some information on Canva from Mergent Intellect and also from news sources, like Nexis Uni, as well as in business databases like Business Source Complete, Regional Business News and EBSCO Management (see Article Searching, below).

 

Most other AE competitors, like Pixlr, BeFunky and Snappa, for example, are private companies with little information available. You can find minimal profiles for these companies in Reference Solutions. Vista Create, another competitor,  is (ultimately) owned by an Irish company called Cimpress, which does have a profile in Marketline, but they are a $3b company and most of what they do is other than design software, so their profile may not provide much useful insight. Look for press releases and news stories in the article databases below to find some information on what these companies are doing.

Consumer and Marketing Research

Article Searching

Searching in article databases is often overlooked and underrated. These databases have information from a wide variety of business sources, from academic research, to trade publications and popular business press, like Forbes and Fast Company.

The way you search here matters. See the Effective Searching tab for some advice and also the table below for useful language to get you started.

In addition to searching for AE competitors, as mentioned above, you can search here for information on effective marketing, consumer trends and more.
For this concept Start with words like
Gen Z ("Gen Z" or GenZ or "generation z")
Consumer psychology ("consumer attitudes" or "consumer behavior")
Purchase drivers ("purchase intention" or "path to purchase" or "willingness to pay")
social media ("social media" or Instagram or Twitter or TikTok or Snpchat or Facebook)
Marketing (marketing or advertising)