Troubled times need smarter market data
Jinfo Blog

28th January 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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A year ago, LexisNexis launched Statistical Datasets, a new service enabling researchers to build their own statistical tables from multiple sources http://www.vivavip.com/go/e3721. Now eContent magazine reports http://digbig.com/4yeef that LexisNexis has added the EASI Market Planner to the service, combining data on consumer demographics, expenditure and media habits for all US geographic areas. With customers currently reluctant to spend and credit almost impossible to come by, marketing data is likely to assume overriding importance for the next year or two for companies desperate to shift goods and services. But Outsell’s latest Information Pricing Survey http://digbig.com/4yeeg reports many information managers currently facing flat budgets at best, and shrinking budgets as the likely new norm. In these circumstances, there’s no disputing that Statistical Datasets offers significant value-add, both in terms of aggregation of the figures and presentation of the resulting comparative output http://digbig.com/4yeeh. But it’s worth pointing out that much of the source data on which it draws will be available for free – so why not take a look at Offstats http://digbig.com/4yeen the database of freely available official statistics on the web, compiled by the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Of course this lacks the functionality of a service like Statistical Datasets – but the value of services of this kind derives not from the volume of data they make available, but from the quality of interpretation that users can apply to it. Here are just a couple of examples of that interpretation in action. First, Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estée Lauder, noted http://digbig.com/4yeep that in the recessions of 1990 and 2001 – and even as far back as the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s – cosmetic sales counter-intuitively increased. He coined the term the Lipstick Index to account for the fact that, in an economic downturn, some affordable indulgences can do well. Then there’s the Economist magazine’s celebrated Big Mac index of purchasing power parity http://digbig.com/4yees which attempts to determine whether currencies are under- or over-valued by comparing the price of McDonald’s hamburgers in 120 countries. The latest index http://digbig.com/4yeer indicates that the UK pound is now looking cheap compared with last summer and the yen is about right, while the euro is still somewhat over-valued. Burgernomics is not meant to be taken terribly seriously, and data collected by the market research group Kline & Company suggests there is actually no clear correlation between recession and lipstick sales. But that doesn’t invalidate the habit of applying imagination to the data that we as information professionals monitor and select for alerting purposes. For the ultimate in imaginative interpretation of raw data in these troubled times, try Freakonomics http://digbig.com/4yeet a 2005 book that claims to show how economics can explain practically anything.

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