Light at the end of the tunnel

This morning my newborn twins slept until 4 am for the first time, and I woke up thinking, Great! There is light at the end of the tunnel.

This is much of what we see and hear from clients too. Small signs that business is rebounding: customer counts stabilizing, achieving Plan (even though Plan is down to LY), customers actually buying full price, prospects starting to respond again, new ecommerce programs showing strength, retail comps climbing back from the deep end. Economically, we see the Dow rebounding and hear that home sales have picked back up a little, along with consumer confidence.

For me, one of the biggest surprises is hearing that high price point brands and/or brands selling nice-to-haves vs. must-haves are seeing a pick up too. To manage expectations, we are not talking about leaps over LY here- just a slow pick up against results that were down to LY in the double digits.

Last night, when I searched for coupons for two websites I was shopping on, nothing came up. I still made the transactions though, and as a marketer, I wondered if I was throwing off someone's incremental testing for the impact of promotions... If we can finally pull away from the constant promotions, we are left to really think about how to MARKET to our customers. How exciting!