Crunch Time

We did a quick poll last week with just over 2,000 UK consumers using our online research tool >ENGAGE.

We’ve been working on cars and wanted to get a feel for how the current economic climate and the media’s coverage of events were influencing consumer purchase intentions.

We asked: “Thinking about the current economic environment, which of the following purchases were you considering 6-12 months ago that you are not considering now?”

Top answers were:

- Holiday 26%
- Home extension & other improvements 22%
- New car 18%
- New home 8%

What does this mean?

Well in our case it makes selling cars more difficult (!) though behind the top-line numbers we found some interesting insights. One of these was that the over-50s seemed to be far more resilient to the current economic challenges. In fact the ‘grey market’ – debt free, with significant savings and a hold on 40% of UK consumer spending – start to look like a relatively recession proof audience.

We plan to dig deeper ……

Another useful source of research in these turbulent times – for B2B marketers – is the B2B Marketing Insight Report 2008. It was created by B2B Marketing and Gyro to provide a definitive picture of the rapidly emerging B2B marketing sector, during the heart of the credit crunch.

More details can be found here http://www.b2bm.biz/insightreport/