Consumer confidence has gone up by 4%.

picture source : www.loanspeed.com

This seems to me worth remarking on and even worth celebrating a bit. I know this is still a very low score (-18%). Although bear in mind that consumer confidence has not been positive for a very long time, in fact since 2005. And it is true that one of the key criteria that makes up the overall figure – confidence in making major purchases – is actually down. But the current Gfk NOP survey shows the first positive turn for consumer confidence trends overall since February this year.

Look – we’re all back now from our summer breaks. We have the autumn to look forward to. Some hard and perhaps even grim business planning for 2011. Increasing levels of darkness, how long have we got until we arrive in the office before sunrise and leave after sunset? Rain, wind, maybe storms. Joy of joys – tube strikes.

What we need is some optimism. Some planning for growth – actual growth that is – not just figures that aren’t quite as bad as they might be.

And so we should take a moment to be pleased that the great British public is feeling a bit more positive this August – goodness knows it wasn’t the weather because the late summer was a wash out.

At the beginning of the year a journalist asked me whether I thought we were in for a recovery in the first quarter. I replied that I thought that it was unlikely. I added that I thought that a recovery anyway was the wrong thing to hope for. What we need in the media sector is a reconstruction. Media Agencies and Media Owners cannot look to continue to make money in the same way as in the past. More change is coming whether we like it or not as a result of big changes in media driven by the consumer and by technologies. This is where the reconstruction must come.

A bit more consumer optimism makes this autumn the perfect time to do it.

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