Posts tagged ‘Global Monitor’
Looking back on Looking Up
Walker Smith writes: For the past three years, since the economic crisis ballooned, I’ve been writing a regular column called Looking Up, on the ways for businesses to manage through recession and tough markets; I wrote the last one in the series earlier this month.
I wrote the first Looking Up in October, 2008, just over a month after the global financial system went to the edge of collapse. (I’m not being melodramatic here; if you need a stark reminder of just how close we came to financial meltdown during the eight days from September 12 to September 19, 2008, James Stewart’s New Yorker essay “Eight Days” is still chilling).
The column had three purposes. It translated financial concepts, to help people navigate the macro-economic news. It provided evidence and examples, to show that there were still opportunities in the market. And the third, and most important, purpose of Looking Up was to offer insights and guidance about how to reach consumers effectively during the Great Recession and subsequent stagnant recovery. Over three years, Looking Up focused on delivering insight and inspiration to our clients.
And looking back on something like a hundred issues, I see that three themes repeated themselves over and over again. They’re worth repeating here.
Innovation. The single most effective way to thrive in a downturn is to innovate. Reams of academic research have demonstrated this across past downturns and across geographies. There are hundreds of examples of successful innovations introduced during the depths of past recessions, along with hundreds of examples of defunct companies that went bust waiting out a recession while competitors innovated. The logic is simple: innovation sparks new demand, creates new jobs and advances the overall productivity of the economy, which is the key to prosperity.
No other theme has been mentioned in Looking Up as often as innovation, one of the core practice areas of The Futures Company. If you had to take just one thing away from Looking Up, it would be: innovate!
Sourcing growth. The biggest challenge facing companies at the moment is sourcing growth. Unemployment, stock market volatility, cuts in government benefits, deleveraging and housing price declines all mean that household budgets remain tight. But there are pockets of strength in the consumer marketplace; more can be found through close scrutiny and shrewd analysis. A number of MONITOR methods, such as Dynamax, have been developed to identify this enduring spending potential.
Practice optimism. Consumers take their cue from businesses. Optimism is contagious (as research has shown time after time). If you want consumers to be buoyant again, you need to help. Conversely, if your marketing echoes their worst fears, don’t expect them to be cheerful. There’s a virtuous circle here: if businesses look up, then your customers will too.
Global MONITOR is an innovative, strategic, future-focused Global Insights programme for clients and agencies. It identifies the key dynamics shaping the world and the consumer marketplace, as well as potential implications for your clients’ businesses. If you want to know more about Global MONITOR, please call Simon Kaplan in the United States, or Deniz Erdem in Europe.
The picture at the top of this post was originally published by Global Envision – well worth a visit – and is used with thanks.
23 December 2011 at 8:40 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The volatile world
Henry Tucker writes:
The Futures Company has recently released the latest edition of Global MONITOR, our large scale syndicated future-focused Insights Programme. Global MONITOR’s analysis is underpinned by a survey of 27,000 respondents in 21 markets, and its research underpins much of thinking about social, cultural, and consumer change. Over the next few weeks we’ll be running a series of blog posts on themes from this research.
One of the most important themes of Global MONITOR 2011 is about consumer volatility. Three years into the financial crisis, those in richer nations have experienced long periods of austerity, unprecedented since the last World War. Eleswhere, pressures of growth are causing their own problems, from pollution to poisoning, in the case of China’s food scandals. This has made consumers feel both vulnerable and vigilant. And some of the data are striking:
- 42% agree that they ‘usually buy the cheapest product available’
- 51% of consumers, globally, agree that they are making more of an effort to buy less than they did before.
- 62% agree that ‘the world feels like an increasingly hostile and uncertain place’ (a high level of agreement for such a strongly worded question).
These tensions are expressing themselves culturally as well as economically. In most markets, the proportion of those agreeing with the statement ““I appreciate the influence other cultures have on our way of life in this country” has fallen quite sharply over the past two years. People are drawing in.
What we’re seeing as a result is that consumers are becoming as self-reliant as they can, reducing their exposure to an uncertain world wherever possible. Of course, ‘self-reliance’ conjures images of people storing clean water and tinned food in their cellars, but the emerging trend is, instead, about networked reliance. People use social connections, both to find new information, to look for deals, and to lean on each other for support. As they do so, their expectations of what business should be doing for society have become sharper. The proportion agreeing that “Companies have a responsibility to help support the society in which they operate” has seen a significant jump year on year in many markets. It’s another layer of complexity that many businesses could do without in tough times. But get it wrong and consumers will punish you for it.
The picture at the top is from Global MONITOR, and shows people’s perceptions of how their countries are doing and also how they are doing.
Global MONITOR is an innovative, strategic, future-focused Global Insights programme for clients and agencies. It identifies the key dynamics shaping the world and the consumer marketplace, as well as potential implications for your clients’ businesses. If you want to know more about Global MONITOR, please call Simon Kaplan in the United States, or Deniz Erdem in Europe.
18 November 2011 at 10:47 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Pride and confidence
Will Galgey writes:
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the launch of the WPP BrandZ report on the Top 50 Chinese Brands, which Oliver blogged about here, and I wanted to add some thoughts to his post.
When I was last in China a few months ago, I came back from breakfast to find my hotel room being cleaned. The maid, who spoke no English, beamed a broad smile and immediately started trying to tell me something, gesticulating with her fingers to make the number ‘two’ and pointing at the television, which she had tuned to CNN. My Mandarin was no better than her English, and it was only after she left that I saw the news that China had just overtaken Japan to become the second largest economy in the world.
The story exemplifies for me the intense pride the Chinese have in their country and its achievements, which we also see in our proprietary Global MONITOR data. (How many Britons, or Italians, or Canadians, would know or care about their country’s ranking in the world economic league table?).
Many commentators conclude that this national pride will increasingly lead the Chinese to turn inwards, and favour domestic brands over their western counterparts. But this is wrong. The reality is that the Chinese are sufficiently self-confident in what it means to be Chinese, and their ability to choose selectively from other cultures, that they are actually very open to other cultural influences and don’t bristle at the idea of accepting western brands. In our Global MONITOR survey, the Chinese (along with Saudis) are the least likely to feel that ‘our society is too Americanised’.
But simply playing to notions of status and elitism through an association with the West is no longer enough for western brands looking to succeed in China. Chinese consumers are now far more savvy about price and value and are adopting a much more sophisticated attitude to brands – both foreign and domestic.
It sounds obvious, but both foreign and local brands must remember the difference between what it takes to claim the indoors and the outdoors. Haier and Lenovo do well in China because their products are kept in the home, while Nokia and Chanel do well because they’re on public display. Of course, this is a crude division – and becoming more so every day. To cross it requires a much deeper analysis of the underlying values and attitudes that are driving consumer needs and wants in China, something we are currently helping a number of clients to get to grips with.
The picture at the top of this post comes from an article on Chinese brands in Business World, and is used with thanks.
9 February 2011 at 12:58 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Looking beyond price
Walker Smith writes:
A ‘new normal’ is emerging among consumers in the wake of the financial crisis and the recession: ‘considered consumption’. This trend, which we noted last year, has now been reaffirmed by our latest Global MONITOR survey, which has just been released. One of the consequences is that the focus on price which was so strong immediately following the financial crisis has started to weaken.
Two data points stand out. The first is that 53% of consumers – taking a global average across all 20 countries – agree that ‘price is more important to me than brand names’ (down from 59% in 2009). The second is that 39% agree that ‘it’s best to buy famous brand names because you can rely on their quality’ (up from 34% in 2009).
Although these changes are small, they are notable. It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that consumers who are still tightening their belts also want the reassurance of name-brand quality.
And while there’s been a lot of talk about consumer frugality, what’s actually happening is that they’re practising prioritization. Consumers will stand up for the things that matter to them. But brands need to play their part as well. One of the other trends tracked by Global MONITOR is about interest in brands that practice social responsibility or deliver innovative wellness benefits. That’s been climbing, albeit slowly, over the past three years.
Global MONITOR is The Futures Company’s syndicated insights service. It encompasses an annual quantitative global survey of more than 27,000 consumers in 20 countries; the Global Energies, our consumer trends framework; and Global Streetscapes, our interactive database, continually refreshed, of consumer and brand behaviour. For more information, please contact Jennifer Childs in London or Simon Kaplan in the United States.
