Todd Hale, SVP, Shopper and Consumer Insight, The Nielsen Company
2008 was a stellar year for store brands in the U.S., with both dollar and unit growth outpacing branded offerings across consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories. Store brand dollar sales within food, drug and mass merchandisers grew 10.2% for the year, while branded dollar sales grew by just 2.6%. Although the gap in unit sales was not as wide, indicative of how store brand dollar growth resulted from inflationary pricing across a number of commodity-based categories, store brand units grew 2.6% …

Nielsen business leaders share their perspective on store brand performance and trends around the world.

Nielsen Games released its March 2009 data for top console usage and PC game titles with Playstation 2 and the role-playing game World Of Warcraft again topping their respective lists.

The volume of social media buzz surrounding the swine flu or H1N1 virus appears to have peaked mid-last week before trailing off last Friday. However, online conversations surrounding the virus were higher over the weekend as compared to the previous weekend when the story first began breaking.

Interest, however, remains strong on sites like Twitter, where as of this writing, the Centers For Disease Control has added roughly 30K more followers since Friday. Additionally, the use of H1N1 to describe the virus has increased.

The economic decline has affected most parts of the world, but some have been hit harder than others.  One region that seems to be holding its own is Asia Pacific (APAC).  Although consumer confidence in APAC has declined in recent months, those declines have generally not been as steep as in Europe or North America.  Eight of the twelve markets for which Nielsen tracks ad spending posted growth in 2008 over 2007.  That said, most of the markets were registering declines by the fourth quarter.
Main media, defined by Nielsen as …

The peanut butter salmonella contamination earlier this year – which caused several fatalities – not surprisingly caused a dip in the sales of the product.  But now that the situation has subsided, sales of jarred peanut butter have returned to normal patterns.  For the four-week period ended April 18th, sales rose 2.7 percent over the previous four-week period, and were up 10.7 percent over the same period a year ago.
“The fact is that the contamination was limited to one supplier, and none of the big name brands were affected.  Consumers …

From printable online specials to cell phone downloads to 3D-projected in-store promotions. It’s a brave new digital world at retail, where human interaction now serves as a point of differentiation. Technology is changing the rules at retail.

Moms control 85% of household spending, and are worth more than $2 trillion to U.S. brands. But are marketers really listening? It is time to move beyond creating messaging for moms and start listening to moms.

While emerging markets experience the largest declines in consumer confidence to date, signs of recovery are imminent as the U.S. shows a glimmer of hope posting no significant declines from six months ago.

The 2008 Kentucky Derby boasted the third straight year in viewer growth and females comprised 51%  of all viewers aged 18+, no small feet considering the often male-dominated world of sports viewing.
The overall number of viewers tuning in to see Big Brown win last year’s Derby averaged 14.2 million, 10 percent more than the 12.9 million viewers who saw Barbaro in the winner’s circle just two years earlier.
But the real “horserace” – at least when it comes to Derby viewing – is between men and women, as illustrated in a …