Davis ThinkingEver run or cycled into a headwind? You have to work a lot harder to make the same progress that normally comes a lot more easily. Conversely, running or riding with the wind at your back is a glorious feeling. On a recent ride, I had plenty of opportunity to consider how headwinds and tailwinds apply to business as I tried to distract myself from all the huffing and puffing I was doing just to maintain a decent speed.
While mobile marketing is growing briskly, the pattern of consumers' engagement with it remains uneven from one demographic cohort to another. A BIGresearch study examines the current composition of mobile marketing's audience. And, even as such marketing expands, the research detects continued and growing consumer distaste for many forms of it.
A recession seems like a funny time to move your product mix upscale, but Kimberly-Clark Corp. has been doing just that of late, focusing more on premium and super-premium offerings and brands such as Cottonelle, Viva and Huggies Pure and Natural, while watching distribution of its Scott value brand shrink. It's a bold strategy to zag upscale as most of the market, including archrival Procter & Gamble Co., have been zigging more toward value products and private-label sales have been rising.
Without any fanfare, Google has launched a new resource called "Google Internet Stats" which brings together industry facts and insights from across five different industries. Using a number of third party vendors as sources, the stats tool parses through online data to reveal Twitter-sized snippets and factoids like: "Over 90% of online merchants are planning to add rich media and social networking functions in 2009 -Internet Retailing" or "Runners have collectively logged over 93 million miles on nikeplus.com - BusinessWeek." While the stat center is an excellent new resource, there is one odd thing about it - it's hosted on the google.co.uk domain even though many of the sources used for stats have a global focus. The collection of statistics is broken down into five main areas of focus: Technology, Macro Economic Trends, Media Landscape, Media Consumption, and Consumer Trends.
Oh, it's so nice to be right. When market researcher Mintel released its list of leading consumer prognostication late last year, it knew that financial worries would drag consumers' emotions down for much of the year, and put the spotlight on trading down and switching brands. But now that its data from the first six months of the year is available, the company has taken another look at its forecast, and says that while people "still feel pessimistic," there's plenty of evidence that they are lightening their mood as often as possible.
A new study by London-based market research firm Hall and Partners that examines how the economy is affecting consumer trends in the U.S., the U.K. and mainland China finds few surprises -- the UK and U.S. are pessimistic, while Chinese citizens see a bright future once the economy goes through short-term turmoil.
It’s that time of the year again: time for endless predictions of what’s going to happen in 2009, most of which are rather dark and gloomy with economies around the world going downhill. Fortunately, there are still plenty of trends out there that are begging to be applied profitably, both now and long-term.
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