The Ipsos Global @dvisor

In the last edition of Global @dvisor we described the "Gathering Storm" of the economic crisis we are now living through. Our major point was that we need a new language to talk about the crisis. In our view, it's not useful to describe the crisis as a recession or a depression. That's because both terms are too narrow and backward-looking to accurately describe what's happening. We argued that the term "disruption" more accurately describes what global citizens are experiencing. Why disruption? Because it implies that the change is more fundamental than a garden-variety economic slowdown. Established economic patterns and relationships have been disrupted, and we are transitioning into an environment that's very different from the one we remember. In their struggle to keep up with this new world, practitioners of the "dismal science" have attempted to develop a new economic alphabet to describe the disruption. Will this be a "V" recession, with its short, sharp reduction in economic activity followed by a fast and robust recovery? Or is it a "U" recession, with its more sustained trough, and its similarity to previous recessions? Or, is it a "W" recession, which is really two back-to-back V's or U's, depending on how you see the trough. While this is an interesting exercise, it's all rather misleading because the new world will look very different from the old. To us, a more useful activity is connecting with consumer citizens to understand how they are responding to the crisis, and how their behaviour will determine the nature of the recovery.

About Global @dvisor

The Ipsos Global @dvisor is a semi-annual, online survey of 22,000 consumer citizens in 22 countries across the globe, covering 75% of the world's GDP. It produces syndicated reports and studies specifically tailored to the needs of corporations, advertising and PR agencies, and governments.