Category Archives: Consumer behavior

Healthier grocery shopping? Yes and no.

By Jacob Brown | August 24, 2010

There has been a lot of press over the recent Whole Foods survey of consumer shopping habits.  In their press release, Whole Foods touts the “Sea change” consumer interest in healthier fresh foods.  To support their position, they show the difference between what consumers self-report as their top 5 shopping cart items in 1980 and today.
In 1980, the [...]

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Sex or Television. Its a tough choice.

By Jacob Brown | July 28, 2010

A couple of years ago I did a study on Boomers and Seniors called “Life, Death, Sex and Shopping”,  one of the findings showed that women (unlike men) would give up sex before they’d give up chocolate.
Now, The Continuum Crew, a communications firmed focused on the 40Plus market, has released a study called Mature Consumer Purchase [...]

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Quality is the key to digital content revenue.

By Jacob Brown | July 22, 2010

As we all know, online content is the killing fields of today’s economy.  Never have so many, bled so much, for so few paying customers.  But, after endless articles and posts on bad news, there was a glimmer of hope in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Digital ad revenue was up 21%
Digital ad revenue is now more [...]

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Private label pricing war in Consumer Packaged Goods.

By Jacob Brown | February 6, 2010

The recession has had a fascinating and unexpected impact on the price battle between private label products and brand name CPG products.
The chart below (from IRI’s January Times and Trends report) shows how the prices of private label products increased MUCH more rapidly than the total  CPG market during 2007 and 2008.  I believe these price increases [...]

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Social Media gets a little grayer.

By Jacob Brown | January 29, 2010

In its recent report, Boomers and Social Media, eMarketer tracks the rapid adoption of social media among Boomers.  This report provides some excellent information on the growth of Social Media among Boomers and Seniors.Â
According to Deloitte data, 2009 was the year that social media bloomed for Baby Boomers, with nearly 47% of them actively maintaining a profile on [...]

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Why Gourmet Magazine Dies While The Food Network Prospers

By Jacob Brown | October 8, 2009

I was on a morning flight from NY to Chicago yesterday, reading the story in the New York Times about the death of Gourmet Magazine.  News about yet another magazine folding is hardly even news.
What makes this more interesting is that I looked up from the article to see that the in-flight entertainment was an [...]

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Has Social Networking reached the saturation point?

By Jacob Brown | July 9, 2009

There have been countless articles written on the true size of the Social Networking world.  I’ve contributed to the deluge with a couple of posts on my own site (Myths of Social Networking and More Myths of Social Networking).Â
Anderson Analytics recently released an extremely useful study on the SNS market.  You can read a summary [...]

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Why have deep discounts stopped working for some retailers?

By Jacob Brown | June 7, 2009

Over the past 9 months, moderate and up-scale retailers have resorted to unprecedented deep discounts to drive sales and maintain store traffic.  And it worked, for a while.
Now, it looks like these price promotions have begun to wear out.  The Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article on the topic the other day Discounting [...]

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Burger King and McDonald’s take separate paths to Value.

By Jacob Brown | June 3, 2009

Price promotions are an important tool, especially in these difficult economic times.  But, the panic of declining sales often leads marketers to confuse price promotion with brand strategy.  No where is this more evident than in fast food, where we’ve seen many restaurants try to drive traffic by virtually giving away their food.
A recent LA Times article outlined some [...]

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Long Term Shift to Private Labels?

By Jacob Brown | April 23, 2009

There has been a lot of press recently on the dramatic rise in Private Label products.  Most of the articles say something like: “Consumers are moving to store brands in an effort to save money”.  Case closed.
In reality the causes of the shift - and the implications of the shift are a little more complex.Â
For [...]

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