Recently, at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 Conference, The Nielsen Company featured a unique exhibit, Consumed: The Economy Hits Home, which looks at how today’s uncertain economy is shaping consumer attitudes and behaviors and how marketers can navigate this new landscape to uncover growth opportunities. Mark Leiter, President, Professional Services, provides a guided video tour.

Read the corresponding presentation: Consumer or Consumed.
More video and presentations available at Consumer360.com.

Todd Hale, Senior Vice President, Consumer and Shopper Insights
For those of you who attended our 2009 Consumer 360 client conference, you heard the opening remarks from John Lewis, President & CEO, Nielsen Consumer North America, on the impact of the economy on our industry.  His message was about how our company is “investing considerable resources in the area of thought leadership to mine Nielsen content to understand what will happen tomorrow; where (our economy) will settle; and what will the new paradigm look like?”
When John looks at the economy he …

Al McClain, Founder & CEO, Retail Wire
A primary theme of the high-energy general session on Day Two of the Nielsen Consumer360 conference was encouraging attendees to use the current recession as a learning opportunity, in order to build better relationships with consumers and/or reinvent business models.
From Nielsen’s James Russo, there was talk of the fact that great companies such as GE, Disney, Microsoft, and HP were started during economic downturns. And, he felt that consumers may soon be spending more, albeit with some restraint. Signs of the recession …

Our CPG world is one where technology is rapidly evolving and transforming how consumers receive, seek and use information to impact buying and shopping decisions. This makes our jobs exciting and challenging at the same time as it is harder than ever to manage the ever-changing technology landscape and almost impossible to control.

At the Consumer 360 Conference yesterday Malcolm Gladwell gave some fascinating remarks on compensatory learning. I thought it was a perfect frame for what Nielsen is doing in the area of Shopper Management. The basic message is that some people, or businesses or processes, achieve greatness through continuous and iterative improvement. That is precisely the path we are in Shopper Management at Nielsen.

The vendor and retail communities require clarity to see beyond the economic climate of today and embrace the silver lining of the changing behaviors of consumers. That was the key takeaway after 24 hours of in-depth sessions at The Nielsen Company’s Consumer 360 Conference in Orlando. Attendees were handed the tools to succeed. They’ve discovered those tools will be used to reconstruct their relationships with their customers.

Results of our new alcoholic beverage consumer survey seems to suggest that an economic hangover may be in our future. More than 5,000 U.S. consumers of legal drinking age tell us that when the recession lifts, their alcoholic beverage spending will be fairly restrained. In fact, three-quarters of consumers tell us that either when out or at home, they are not planning on changing their spending habits when the economy improves. Of the remainder, any increases will fall into the “little” and not “a lot” category.
As …

With the economy effecting consumers, retailers, and marketers alike, this week’s Nielsen’s Consumer360 Conference presents an opportunity to think about new ways of addressing this marketing challenge.

On Tuesday, a session called “Data Mining the Recession”, presented by Nielsen’s Mark Laceky and Mitch Kriss identified three main ways shoppers are trying to save money.

Collaboration is the theme vividly painted at The Nielsen Company’s Consumer 360 morning kick off – as attendees found themselves consumed in data illustrating a continuously changing consumer mindset, fed by an ongoing shift in consumer psychology. And the message was clear from the start: collaboration at the retail-vendor level will be key the successfully navigating this challenging, changing landscape.

The economic downturn has been a boon to dollar stores, which attracted increased consumer spending in 2008, including spending among high and middle income shoppers, according to The Nielsen Company. Nielsen’s analysis of consumer shopping habits shows consumers at all income levels shopping more at dollar stores, with high income shoppers spending 18 percent more at dollar stores in the second half of 2008 compared to the prior year. Dollar stores are outpacing major consumer packaged goods (CPG) channels among both low and high income shoppers. The …