Low Consumer Confidence Research Articles

The Impact of Consumer Confidence on Store Satisfaction and Share of Wallet Formation

For retailer managers, it is crucial to understand the relationships between customers’ store attribute evaluations, satisfaction, and share of wallet as well as how these relationships change over time depending on the business cycle. This study investigates this complex relationship using an extensive dataset for all grocery chains in the Netherlands over the period 2009–2012. Our findings indicate that retailers should not overemphasize the importance of a favorable price image in times of low consumer confidence. Instead, our study shows that the relationship between service attributes and customer satisfaction is stronger in periods with low consumer confidence.

Health Smart Cards

Smart cards are credit card-sized plastic cards, with an embedded dime-sized Integrated Circuit microprocessor chip. Smart cards can be used for keyless entry, electronic medical records, etc. Health smart cards have been in limited use since 1982 in Europe and the United States, and several barriers including lack of infrastructure, low consumer confidence, competing standards, and cost continue to be addressed.

Knowledge management intersects with customer relationship management (CRM) for increased organizational competitiveness

In today's economy of decreased earnings, decreasing working capital and low consumer confidence, organizations are looking for ways to retain customers, and increase customer profitability and top line growth. Since the cost of acquiring new customers is nearly five times greater than the cost of retaining existing ones, organizations are seeking to develop sound customer relationship management (CRM) strategies that have an integral knowledge management component to significantly impact the bottom line (whether that line is profitability or return on capital employed).

Consumer Confidence and Stock Returns

Financial advisors who worked to restrain exuberant investors in the late 1990s, worked equally hard to lift desperate investors in the early 2000s. Will lower stock prices sap the confidence of consumers? Will lower consumer confidence extinguish all hope for investors? We study the consumer confidence measures of the Conference Board and the University of Michigan and the investor sentiment measures of the American Association of Individual Investors and Investor's Intelligence. We find that consumers grow confident when investors grow bullish. Consumer confidence declines when stock prices decline but investors need not fear that declines in consumer confidence would be followed by low stocks returns. Low consumer confidence is followed by high stock returns more often than it is followed by low stock returns.

Polymer production jumped 7.2% in 1994

Synthetic polymers—plastics, synthetic fibers, and synthetic rubber—all sustained robust growth in 1994. Increasing substitution of these products for paper, natural fibers, and natural rubber, together with a growing economy, led to an overall increase in output of 7.2% from 1993. For the polymers covered in this survey, production rose to a record high of 72.3 billion lb. Plastics, which account for more than three-fourths of total polymer production, grew 7% from 1993. growth came despite Texas floods that cut short a promising year [and] serious supply disruptions that robbed resin producers of feedstocks, says Kevin L. Boyle, who is Society of the Plastics Industry resin statistics chairman. The long dry spell of low consumer confidence and flagging businesses ended somewhere in 1992 or 1993, he says. This gave plastics converters the incentive to produce products and inventory, to bring new ideas to market, and to increase exports. And it made 1994 a pivotal year ...