I was trying to get access to the last Canadian Internet Use Survey today. Statistics Canada provides a CD-Rom for the low, low price of $2400. Ouch. I went to AskAway next, it’s a great resource of volunteer librarians from BC that are available 13 hours a day to help you find helpful reference information.
No dice, it’s not in the libraries (probably cost prohibitive). UBC has a copy apparently, but you have to be able to log in to their archives to get it. (Any UBC students out there wanna make $50?)
It’s tough to find Canadian consumer data, after digging deep though I was able to find a report from Neilsen (the ratings and ranking company, you know the ones) that places Canada in the top 10 rated countries for overall consumer confidence.
What’s consumer confidence? It’s how good or bad you feel as consumers about the state of the economy and your personal finances. It’s measured, in part, by the things we worry about – like global warming and the economy. It’s also measured by tracking where our money goes, and our thoughts on the future of the economy.
So, what are we worried about? In a nutshell – our health, global warming and increasing bills. We’re worried about other things too, but those three are all well above the global average. We’re not as worried about the economy either, a stat that’s confirmed when you look at where our money is going.
When we look at the data, we can learn that while Canadians are lower than the global average in luxury spending, we are not quite as debt focused as the average American.
A corresponding study in the Neilsen report indicates that an overwhelming number of Canadians believe the recession will be over in a year.
Our language has turned from ‘recession’ to talks of ‘recovery’, which shows that the average Canadian feels confident with their financial status, job futures and the state of the economy as a whole. Source: Neilsen Ratings: Canada breaks into the top 10
In the internet world, what does it all mean? Possibly that internet properties will make efforts to target Canadians (and their wallets) more aggressively, and new Canadian startups are more likely to be profitable in the near future.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on April 9, 2010 at 4:25 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged Marketing, Reference. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.