Grocery sales in the U.K. are holding their ground despite the continued economic difficulties, according to a new survey from Nielsen. Overall, sales grew 5.7 percent in the twelve-week period ended February 21 versus the same period last year, with all of the top 4 grocers attracting new customers.
Asda and Sainsbury showed solid growth during the quarter (7.6% and 5.5%, respectively), while Morrisons grew a strong 8.2 percent, driven by increased spending from its shoppers and Waitrose re-energized its business with 3.2 percent growth.
Discount retailers continued to make gains …

Julie Enzweiler
In the past year, Nissan N.A. and Ford Motor Co. Web sites are showing signs of increased consumer interest as evidenced by comparing the unique visitors from January 2008 to January 2009. In terms of year-over-year growth in site visitors, Nissan N.A. saw an increase of 14% while Ford Motor Co. showed a 9% increase. Chrysler LLC experienced the steepest decline in site traffic at 26% followed by General Motors (-17%), Toyota Motor Sales (-11%) and Honda Motor Co. (-5%).

In January 2008, visitors to Chrysler LLC sites also visited …

According to Nielsen Online, approximately 8.5 billion Web searches were conducted during February 2009, a 10% percent jump from January 2008.
Google searches accounted for 63.5 percent of all Web searches with nearly 5.4 billion queries. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.com continued to round out the top five.

RANK
Provider
Searches (000)
YOY Growth
Share of Searches

All Search
8,494,653
10.10%
100.00%

1
Google Search
5,394,190
19.20%
63.50%

2
Yahoo! Search
1,415,354
4.00%
16.70%

3
MSN/Windows Live Search
881,050
2.40%
10.40%

4
AOL Search
320,098
-19.90%
3.80%

5
Ask.com Search
162,226
-16.90%
1.90%

6
My Web Search
55,772
-21.60%
0.70%

7
Comcast Search
42,895
1.30%
0.50%

8
Yellow Pages Search
37,636
N/A*
0.40%

9
AT&T Worldnet Search
17,371
-27.60%
0.20%

10
Dogpile.com Search
15,880
-28.90%
0.20%

Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

* A year-over-year comparison is not possible because of a definitional change to Yellow Pages …

Even though news of the peanut butter salmonella outbreak has subsided, peanut butter sales continue to decline.
During the four-week period ending February 21, 2009, sales of jarred peanut butter fell to $87.2 million, down 2.3 percent from the same period in 2008.  41.8 million pounds of jarred peanut butter was sold during the current four-week period, down 13.3 percent for the same period a year ago.  Pounds sold is at the lowest point of the three-year span Nielsen has tracked the total U.S. Food/Drug/Mass (including Walmart) Stores channel.
“While most brands …

John Burbank, Nielsen Online
For years, it has been assumed that home internet usage would cannibalize live television viewing, but there’s something interesting happening between social networking and live television.  Could it be that what Pete Blackshaw termed “telecommunities” – people simultaneously watching live television programs and chatting in real time with an online network of like-minded fans - will gain scale and give consumers a reason to stick with live viewing?
Let’s look at what happened during the Oscars.
During this year’s broadcast, we used Nielsen’s “Convergence Panel” – a sample of homes in which we …

Ken Cassar, Nielsen Online
For our March 11 webinar, “Retail Recession Realities,” I’ll be recommending coping strategies for retailers dealing with the ongoing economic crisis. The news has gone from bad to worse in the past six months, but there are approaches retailers can take to survive the lean times and even come out ahead when (dare I say it?) the economy recovers.
The Web offers opportunities for growth like no other channel. Quick case in point – readership of traditional offline newspapers has declined significantly of late, and with it, the …

It’s a long running joke: men and women are wired differently.  But the field of neuroscience has proven that this is no joking matter, and the ramifications are tremendous for consumer goods manufacturers, as women buy or influence the purchase of 80 percent of all consumer goods in the U.S.
So what are the key differences between the male and female brain? There are some key structural differences, such as a larger hippocampus in women, as well as a heavier reliance on brain areas that contain mirror neurons, which enable a …

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places.” If data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 is any indication, that percentage is likely to grow as time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth.
“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” commented John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online. “While two-thirds …

Marketers across industries are being charged with cutting back their marketing schedules to fit leaner budgets. However the dilemma for most is deciding what media hits the cutting room floor. Nielsen’s recession analysis demonstrates how a marketer at a movie studio or any industry can offset much of the potential reach/effective reach declines that would be caused by declining marketing budgets due to the recession.

More than 80 percent of Americans now have a computer in their homes, and of those, almost 92 percent have internet access, according to a detailed report on home internet access prepared by Nielsen.  One year earlier, computer ownership stood at 77.9 percent.
Using data collected from its national and local television panels, the quarterly Home Technology phone survey and the Nielsen Claritas 2008 Convergence Audit survey, the report provides a detailed look at how Americans are getting on the internet and the differences by various demographic breaks.
Key findings of the …