Question

Topic: Student Questions

Consumer Purchasing Behaviour In A Recession

Posted by Anonymous on 10/16/2009 at 12:48 PM ET 250 Points
I am currently a 4th Year student studying marketing, doing my honours disseration on the affect the recession has had upon consumer purchase behaviour during the last year. My key objectives are focusing on what items consumers have spent less on, more on, and those items that have remained stable, before investigating deeper into why exactly this has been the case.
I have found a wealth of online articles, newspaper articles and reports etc surrounding the issue, but I'm struggling to find much strong academic journals on the subject, would you be able to reccomend particular journals which may be of relevance? Thanks for your time, Adam
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Levon on 10/16/2009 at 12:53 PM Accepted
    You will mostly have to compile recent economic data like consumer index data and spending and savings data and synergize it with articles that have touched on recessions of the past.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 10/16/2009 at 6:22 PM Accepted
    Dear Adam,

    The reason you're finding so little academic material might well be because it simply doesn't exist.

    True, here I could be wrong, but unless there's been some incentive for academic review of spending patterns from some think tank somewhere—perhaps something to do with a political stance rather than an economic one, sticks to beat the administration with and all that, your might well search in vain.

    Your best course of action here may well be to create your own. What's stopping you from pulling together considered opinion from your primary sources?

    As long as you cite the relevant sections and make it clear that the findings you're presenting are yours there ought to be no reason why you couldn't present the data you have.

    This approach might actually serve you better than relying on someone else's academic viewpoint. It might well show that you can take opinion and extrapolate relevant data and present it in a compelling, accurate, and revealing way.

    I hope this helps.

    Gary Bloomer
    Wilmington, DE, USA
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 10/17/2009 at 10:10 AM Accepted
    Why not look at major (publicly-traded) retailers for their earnings reports (such as: https://walmartstores.com/download/3083.pdf)? That'll give you hard data from the source.
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