Tag Archives: Consumer behavior

Plus sized clothing; fashion business vs. fashion fantasy.

The Plus Sized clothing market is a booming industry.  And there is finally some evidence that the Fashion Industry is finally embracing this growing market rather hiding it at the back of the store.
Mintel, a leading market research company, has recently released a study highlighting the importance of this segment.  According to Mintel:

Nearly 25% of [...]

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Healthier grocery shopping? Yes and no.

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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Lessons learned from iPad sales.

In a surprise move last week, Forrester Research announced that their “already aggressive” iPad sales forecast needed to be revised upward.
In her blog, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, reflects Forrester’s surprise at the iPad’s sales volume:

But the iPad isn’t behaving like other consumer devices: It has a steamroller of momentum behind it that indicates [...]

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Sex or Television. Its a tough choice.

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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Website usability first - brand imagery second.

More evidence today that it doesn’t matter how beautiful the site looks, if your customers can’t find what they’re looking for.
JD Powers just released the results from their semi-annual survey of consumer satisfaction with automotive websites.  And, not surprisingly, sites that are built around helping customers find information ranked higher than those that stress brand imagery [...]

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Green products gain retailer respect.

For the  past several years there has been an uneasy relationship between producers of Green consumer products and major retailers. 

Large retailers saw Green products as a very limited niche opportunity.
Many Green manufacturers saw traditional retail channels as part of the problem, rather than the solution.

This tension is clearly easing.  Today the Wall Street Journal reported [...]

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Quality is the key to digital content revenue.

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.

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.

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.
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

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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