One might say 2009 was a year of budget cutting and economic pressure. That got us thinking - how did the economic situation effect how people shopped and celebrated the holidays this year, how did they manage their budgets, and how satisfied were they with the gifts they received?

To answer this question, the Audience Intelligence group surveyed 400 people aged 18-65. We found retail stores still trump online stores as the go-to holiday destination, but online retailers are delivering higher customer satisfaction.

According to the survey, despite the increased usage of online retail sites during the holiday season, most people are still visiting actual stores for inspiration and to purchase a gift.  83% of respondents went to a retail store followed by 47% who used online-only sites like Amazon.com or Zappos.com, with 38% using a traditional retailer’s online site (like Walmart.com).  Over half of respondents say they visited retail stores to get ideas for gifts (51%) and nearly as many reached out to friends and family for ideas (43%).

Online sites excelled this year in delivering highly satisfying customer experiences. This was particularly true of online-only stores; 82% of shoppers found their experience at specialty sites to be somewhat or very satisfying. Shoppers were as satisfied with the experience they had at physical retail stores as they were with online sites of retail stores.

“One interesting takeaway from the survey is that the future of the retail may be a showroom,” said Andrea McKenna, a Boston-based retail consultant.  “Shoppers will be able to view and touch merchandise, but transactions will be conducted digitally.”

Download the full report here to learn more about how wish lists impacted shopping and satisfaction with gifts received.

New Model Army, a new business unit from a&g, provides channel connection strategy to advertising agencies and their clients. Our approach focuses on audience intelligence, channel neutral asset allocation, creative amplification, and metrics-based continuous improvement.

Read more about the launch from:

Ad Week

The Boston Globe.

The Boston Business Journal

Visit New Model Army to learn more.

New Model Army provides channel connection strategy to advertising agencies and their clients. Our approach focuses on audience intelligence, channel neutral asset allocation, creative amplification, and metrics-based continuous improvement.

If you click on the window below, our video will tell you all about it.

In our October survey, we found that 25% of moms say the economy has most affected how they manage their household budget. When moms were asked to detail why their budget has changed the most:

• 27% say they are not spending as much on life’s luxuries, with many noting that in this day and age, need comes before want. A few mentioned that because of this, they are not able to do the things they did last year and have less money for fun family activities.

“I have cut back on a lot of things we had for luxuries”

“We do not get any extras anymore, no matter how small”

“We are cutting unnecessary expenses…and truly, it has not effected us in any way other than saving us money”

“Now I make sure we have enough money to pay for what we need”

“Need comes before want”

“I can’t pay for what I could last year”

“I take funds away from other expenses like family fun time”

• 22% say that it was because everything else has become so much more expensive. Of these moms, nearly half say that their wages are either not keeping up with the increases in the cost of living or they have seen a decrease in wages/lost a source of income.

“The cost of everything has gone up and my wages have stayed the same”

“It seems like everything but my paycheck rises”

• 12% say they are dining out less.

“We don’t go out to eat as often and pack a picnic for soccer games, etc.”

• 9% say they are now on a budget.

“Now I have my family on a tight budget”

“I am watching more carefully where my money is being spent”

• 8% say they are trying to conserve or waste less energy or food.

“Keep the heat down low”

“We conserve energy and we recycle more”

• 6% say they are trying to save.

“I feel like we should be prepared for any financial possibility”

“I am trying to cut corners on my household budget so we can save money that we might need for other, more important things”

• 6% say they are traveling less.

• 6% say they are using more coupons, or shopping sales or thrift stores.

• 5% say they are not using credit cards as much or are trying to pay off debt.

“I have stopped charging on my credit card and…I think twice before I make a purchase”

“Buying any big ticket items will be out for a long time until we pay off the things we owe”

• 2% say they have moved.

 
There are three reasons why the aging workforce will impact brands.

The first and most obvious reason is there will be fewer workers available. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that by 2010 more than 25% of the working population will reach retirement age. They estimate that we may have a worker shortage nearly 10 million people large. Fewer workers quickly translate into poorer service and production quality. And these often sound the death knell for brand promises.

Second is the fast exodus of institutional knowledge. As workers retire, they leave with the memories of past successes and failures, the history of brands and product launches, of even the company’s raison d’être. I understand exiting talent has always posed a challenge, but it has never occurred in the numbers we are about to encounter.  And this is the key. If organizations don’t have a systematized way to transfer this knowledge, they run the risk of repeating history.

And the third reason is the younger generation works differently. As a colleague here put it, they are less interested in being a student and more interested in being mentored. This means that you can’t just train them to replace the aging workers. They don’t just want to be slotted in. They want to feel a part of the future of the organization they are joining and they believe they have the right to redefine the jobs they are accepting.

This week BusinessWeek wrote about how HR departments must change in order to attract the Net Generation (the segment of the workforce under the age of 30). They maintain that corporations should walk away from the old model of talent management - recruit, train, supervise, and retain - and initiate a new model that appeals to their expectations for a two-way conversation, one they sum up as: initiate, engage, collaborate, and evolve. I couldn’t agree more.  But this must be done in a way that helps build the brand and foster a sense of belonging.

Brands can help organizations bridge the age gap and bring workers together, provided they are experienced through a highly functional and truly engaging social environment. Now is the time for organizations to start using the digital social tools of our younger generations.  I think of this next round of enterprise applications as the offspring of operational systems that most corporations have adopted over the years (like business intelligence or ERP software) and social networking sites (like Facebook or MySpace).

Here are just a few places I think branded Enterprise 2.0 solutions can help.

• By educating the younger worker in an environment that is both familiar and relevant.
• By helping young workers feel connected to senior management and the rest of the organization.
• By amplifying brand evangelism, making the organization stickier for finicky, loyalty-adverse young workers.
• By keeping the conversation in your backyard - they are talking about you already, only now you know what they are saying and can respond.
• By helping the workers be more efficient thus compensating for a smaller workforce.

Consider the possibilities:

• Organizations can create virtual mentoring relationships - in real-time or canned - that will allow the departing generation to pass on the knowledge they have gained through the decades. Real-time relationships would happen in, you guessed it, real-time with HR departments creating links between the entering workers and the seasoned pros. Canned relationships could be captured in the form of blogs or videos that can be accessed years after the creator has retired.
• Young workers can be linked into the EVPs, fostering a sense of interconnectedness and self-worth.
• Reasons to work for the organization are no longer filtered from the top down - anyone can share what they like about the organization - and dislike. This comes with the territory, but since it is happening on your social network, you can respond.
• Social networks help capture the wisdom of the crowd - thus improving your organizational smarts by collecting the smarts of the hundreds of minds that work for you and harnessing that power to solve organizational problems.

The technology development is underway - IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are playing in this space.  But you don’t have to go with the big technology vendors - there are a number of free web applications out there (like Ning).

Sadly, most corporations think they don’t need enterprise social networks.  In a 2008 pole conducted by AIIM, people give the following reasons for not considering an Enterprise 2.0 application:

1. The topic never comes up 27%
2. A new approach to collaboration 24%
3. Just Web 2.0 for the enterprise 11%
4. A new approach that enables differentiation and competitive advantage 9%
5. Just a marketing buzzword 9%

The idea that more than 1 in 4 haven’t considered enterprise wide social applications simply because it hasn’t come up before is just shortsighted. And social network tools are more than collaboration tools. They are brand experiences that are designed for the internal audience. In fact, if organizations are considering these solutions at all, they had better be consulting with their marketing departments to ensure they are executed on brand.  A strong organizational understanding of what the brand stands for will strengthen the brand, fortifying it against the upcoming battering it will take in 2010 and beyond.

The economy is affecting us all. The question is how much and in what ways. To help our clients manage this difficult time, we surveyed moms to understand just how the economy is affecting their purchase behaviors and economic outlook.

Why moms? Because they occupy two important roles in American society: they manage the household (which means their behaviors drastically impact sales) and they teach and enforce family values (which means they are as influential in shaping our culture as mass media).

We learned that most (71%) feel they have made more sacrifices this year vs. last. In fact, 2 in 3 are eliminating purchases that are not absolutely necessary for their lifestyle. And 1 in 2 have cut back on things. Which means that if your products or services are not seen as essential and relevant, moms are dropping them from their shopping lists.  It’s not simply a matter of price but rather what your brand stands for and how it contributes to their lives.

More moms blame the government for this collapse than banks (32% government v 16% banks). Even more interesting is the fact that nearly as many moms feel everyone is to blame (27% say everyone).

Why? Because many moms believe that the average American is too greedy. Even more believe they are less greedy than the average American. We believe this is a turning point. One where we reign in overindulgence and focus on the things that are most important to us as people and families. And this presents a great opportunity for marketers. Brands that help moms recenter their family will have the upper hand and can ride a social trend to the top.

Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think. The full report can be read here >> (PDF). MarketWatch reports on it here.

Like Jack Kerouac, I am on the road again. After nearly 10 years of taking public transportation to work, I now find myself among the 76% of working Americans who drive to work alone. And I am not liking what I see: collective frustration and anger at the deplorable way most of us drive and a complete lack of respect for one another.

It’s as though we throw common courtesy out the window once we shut the door.

No, I am not surprised. I have been out and about. But I am wondering how we got this way.

There are people out there studying this. And reasons vary. Because constant exposure to bad driving on TV and in video games. Because there is too much traffic. Some go so far as to suggest that when we get behind a wheel we temporarily enter a second reality where other people become other cars.



I think these are factors, not the cause. I think it’s because we have built better cars.

You see, I drive an old ‘85 diesel station wagon to work, a car my family has named “the wiggle wagon”. It is big, it is heavy, it has moderate pick-up, and must be coaxed gear-to-gear, turn-by-turn. Unlike the other drivers I see whose cars let them zip here and there, and who are so euphoric when they cut people off you’d think it were a national pastime, I must lumber along.



My car can’t allow me to do all these mean things because it goes too slow. I am a more deliberate driver because I have to be but it looks like I am being courteous. Maybe I am, but I have no choice.

The truth is technological disadvantages of my car actually make me a better citizen driver.

I think this realization is true for many areas of life. As technology evolves, we are all given the power to do things we couldn’t do before – talk whenever and wherever we like, access whatever info we want, share what ever ideas we have at the moment we have them.

Before, the shortcomings of technology insolated us from making disastrous and seemingly uncivil choices simply because we didn’t have the choice to make. Now that we have more choices, we have greater responsibility. But I think most of us haven’t even stopped to think about what this technological empowerment means for us as individuals and a nation.

Have our technological advances been the death of us? Or the salvation?