It's been a little while since we were last in touch. We've had a busy six months working on a project to monitor the changing consumer landscape as the impact of the recession unfolds. Our work has been focused on helping our clients to identify, quantify, predict and support emerging customer needs during the recession. If you'd like to know more, please click here to request a free summary of the top-line findings.

We hope you like the new format for our updates. The aim is to give you easy access to the information that's most relevant to you and, if you want to know more, you can click straight through to ask.

Please do forward this note on if colleagues might find the work useful.

Unlike many other studies of recessionary behaviour we’ve used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research to map out how different groups are reacting, and then used economic forecasting to size and forecast how these groups will change over time (rather than rely on people to predict for themselves how they will change!).

The findings are available for bespoke analysis.

To request a Free copy of the summary findings - click here

The big finding is "The Recession" is not one thing, but several.

The country is being hit by a combination of - rising prices (food, utilities), declining incomes (bonuses and unemployment) fear (redundancy, retirement and house prices) and (for a very few people) inability to get credit.

Different combinations of these forces are hitting different people in different ways: some are hit by one, two, three or even all four of the factors in different combinations.

There is little wonder therefore that the recession is so difficult to call: it isn’t one thing, but many. As a result strange things are happening: for example despite all the bad news, retail sales are going up, not down. Even house prices (in some areas) are starting to twitch upwards, as the over 50s find that they are bored of getting virtually no interest on their savings.

There is clearly money out there, and people willing to spend it, if you can find them.

Our analysis identifies the different behavioural groups, sizes them and then forecasts them. We look at which segments are still spending and the marketing strategies for flushing out that spending. Finally we look at categories where spending is likely to increase rather than decline in the near future.

By combining the research with the different analytical disciplines we were confident that our work would stand out in the melee of advice currently available. We were pleased to see that The Marketing Society and the Chartered Institute of Marketing agree and were keen to feature the findings.

Click here to request a copy of the CIM presentation.