• Strategy + Business, Wednesday, March 17, 2010 10:57 AM

We've been calling it 'The New Frugality' since Nov. 10, 2008, but it's official now because consultancy Booz & Company says so after a survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that "a strong value consciousness that dictates trade-offs in price, brand, and convenience has become the dominant mind-set among consumers in the United States."

Furthermore, as you probably expected, this mind-set is "reshaping their consumption patterns in ways that will persist even as the economy starts to recover," Matthew Egol, Andrew Clyde and Kasturi Rangan write.

All "we-told-you-so's" aside, the piece is filled with all the charts, graphs and suggestions -- companies "should be changing their product assortments, pricing strategies, advertising, and promotions" -- you'd expect. Perhaps of greatest interest is the identification of six statistically significant consumer segments that the authors say represent nuanced views of the population: Shoppers 2.0, Deal Hunters, Online Window-shoppers, Channel Surfers, Loyalists and Laggards.

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