The market research industry is at the forefront of understanding the changes consumers and companies are going through during these unprecedented times. Many studies and data analyses have been carried out by many research organizations around the world and Romania is no exception. Join us in a three days' event series organized by SORMA, the Romanian Market Research Association, in partnership with ESOMAR, aiming at better equipping clients activating on the Romanian market in responding adequately to the old and new consumer needs: - How have they reacted, attitudinally and behaviourally to the sanitary and the economic crises? - What are the resilient behaviours? What has not changed? - Which are the new consumer expectations towards companies nowadays?Agenda of the day: Welcome: Alina Serbanica, SORMA President and ESOMAR representative for Romania Introduction: Forced into introspection: how what has changed inside does impact our behaviour outside- Roxana Baciu, MEDNET, Moderator and Session Chair How Normal is The New Normal?- Ioana Bobe, Senior Qualitative Researcher, ISRA Center, presentation language: Romanian The Consumer Stress Score- ROCK-ing back after the big "O"?- Denisa Apreutesei, Head of Qualitative Research and Andrei Elvadeanu, Head of Market Strategy, iSense Solutions, presentation language: Romanian What to Expect? Peek into the future by looking at people's plans for using financial products- Ioan Simu, General Manager, Mercury Research, presentation language: Romanian Panel discussion (Romanian): What's the distance between what we feel, say and do? Are changes here to stay? Or it's just a spot reaction to fear?
The Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) can be used to explain and forecast changes in the aggregate course of the economy. Its explanatory as well as its predictive power appears to be relatively low. Partly this might be caused by some methodological problems inhearent to the way in which the questions (upon which the ICS is based) are asked and in which the ICS is computed. Some of these issues already occurred in the literature to a certain extent. In this paper some new evidence is presented to underline the methodological weakness of the index. This is done by means of time series analysis of the Dutch ICS in the period 1974-1983, as well as by means of analysis of one cross section referring to a questionnaire we did ourselves in the spring of 1984. There appear to be for instance serious problems with respect to the interdependences between the answers on the questions and over time, the unidimensionality of the scales, the homogeneity of the answers given. Moreover the ICS differs among various subgroups of the population and especially among different subgroups facing different developments in for instance income.
In this study, we will analyze the data of the consumer surveys in The Netherlands, with help of principal component analysis. The derived components and the index of consumer sentiment are used as predictors of consumer expenditure, along with income data. Our hypothesis is that the derived components contribute to the explanation and prediction of consumer expenditure, even more than the index (Index of Consumer Sentiment, ICS) published by the CBS.