CEO confidence is waning

"The Conference Board Measure of CEO Confidence, which had improved to 53 in the first quarter of 2007, fell to 45 in the second quarter. A reading of less than 50 points reflects more negative than positive responses.
The survey includes about 100 business leaders in a wide range of industries across the nation.

Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said, 'Several quarters of sluggish economic growth have taken a toll on CEOs' confidence, erasing two quarters of improvement. Looking ahead, CEOs do not expect a significant turnaround in conditions and profit expectations. Only a quarter expect profits to increase vs. three-quarters last year, reflecting their pessimistic outlook.'

CEOs' assessment of current economic conditions was little changed from earlier this year, with 23 percent of CEOs compared with 24 percent last quarter claiming the current economic environment is better. In assessing their own industries, however, business leaders were considerably less optimistic. Approximately 23 percent claim conditions are better, down from about 37 percent in the first quarter.

CEOs are less optimistic about the short-term outlook than last quarter. Now, just 17 percent of business leaders expect economic conditions to improve in the next six months, down from 27 percent last quarter. Expectations for their own in"

Market Alignment – The Secret of Highly Profitable, Consistently Growing Companies

Thirty thousand new products are launched each year in the U.S. and an astounding 90 percent fail—despite marketing professionals investing millions of dollars on research trying to understand what customers want. Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen argued in his article “Marketing Malpractice,” (Harvard Business Review, Dec. 1, 2005) that the traditional methods used by marketers to segment markets, build brands, and understand customers no longer worked and that new methods were needed—in short, they needed a new way to achieve market alignment.

We define market alignment as the degree to which a seller’s value offerings align with the value demands of the buyer. We’re finding that the average measure of this alignment is remarkably weak regardless of company size, sector or product. Most companies have less than a 40 percent alignment with their customers’ value demands. It is this weak alignment that’s the root cause of weak margins and inconsistent top line growth.

Christensen argues that most senior executives have lost touch with their customers’ value demands for two reasons:

1. They’re using outdated research tools
2. They’re asking the wrong questions
   

Christensen explains that it isn’t just the mechanics of trying to understand the customer that have failed, but the very premise of what we think we need to know that is no longer relevant, and perhaps, never was.

Learn more at: http://www.nuterrastrategies.com/html/whitePapers.php