Business Blog

I just got off an IM question with a student who was researching the construction equipment rental market.  She had found market research reports about the consumer sector in Mintel Reports, and also industry reports from IbisWorld.  However, she was still looking for business-to-business information.  Through a rather convoluted way of searching Business Source Complete for trade publications about construction equipment, I happened across a trade publication called “Construction Equipment” (what are the odds?).  After looking through a few articles, I found one that referenced “Construction Equipment’s 2009 Annual Report and Forecast.” The report was not available in Business Source Complete, but as of today, it is available for free at the publication’s website.  Here’s the link:

Construction Equipment’s 2009 Annual Report & Forecast – 01/01/2009 – Construction Equipment.

The report covers an Economic Outlook , the commercial or Contractor market, Nonconstruction market, Government, Rental, and Distributors.   It seems like a really good report, and the student seemed to be all smiles (or as smiley as you can get over IM) about the report.

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Nielsen has some new information on how the recession is affecting the spending and playing habits of gamers.

How have gamers responded to the recession? While much of the conversation has focused on fluctuations in new game sales, a new study “The Value Gamer: Play and Purchase Behavior in a Recession” by the Nielsen Company shows there is much more to the story. Over the past several months, the number of hours that gamers claim to be playing is at an all time high, part of a rising trend in gameplay that began in 2007. Additionally, gamers have increased their purchase of used games to record-breaking totals since the Video Game Tracking survey began asking about this in 2006. The same is true for subscriptions to video game rental services by mail. Taken together, these trends point to gamers’ continued engagement with the category even as their budgets have come under pressure. Overall, the recession has not abated the trend of increasing gameplay and may have in fact accelerated it as gamers look to get more value out of the games they own.

via Video Game Engagement At All-Time High During Recession | Nielsen Wire.

The full report, in PDF format, is available here.

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With the recession in full swing and families worrying about jobs, mortgages, grocery bills, and more, the obvious result is that people are adjusting their spending habits.  A report mentioned in AdWeek discusses that it’s now a bit more hip to be cutting coupons.

Parents and families are shifting to a new value system where keeping up with the Joneses is out and teaching the kids about responsible spending is in. Also in, according to a recent report from Starcom and Nickelodeon: putting brands’ feet to the fire and demanding they prove their worth to consumers who increasingly buy generic products in a hunt for deals.

Those are some of the key findings in a joint research effort that explored how the recession has affected family dynamics, relationships to brands and spending patterns.

“Frugality is cool, or the new black if you will,” said Ron Geraci, svp, research at Viacom-owned Nickelodeon. Parents, he said, indicated that they had become “stressed out” by the pressure of having to keep up with “neighbors and friends in the acquisition of cars, trips and homes.” The recession, he added, has provided relief from that burden.

According to the survey, 72 percent of those polled said they agreed with the statement, “It’s no longer important to keep up with the Joneses,” while 48 percent said that as a result of cutbacks in the family budget “we have redefined what’s truly meaningful in our lives.”

via Frugality Is the New Black.

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Nielsen Wire has just posted a report for Consumer Packaged Goods Trends For The Next Decade.

Demographic and economic shifts over the next ten years will dramatically reshape the growth of consumer packaged goods (CPG), according to new research from Nielsen which was presented today at the Consumer 360 conference in Orlando.

In just ten years time, the face of America will change: fewer households will have children, the population will age and lower-income consumers will expand. Additionally, the majority of new families will be multi-cultural in less than two decades.

The PDF full report is available here.

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