Perception May Be 100%, But Is It Accurate?

Let's Think About The Consumer's Perspective?

Clever but legal monetary policies, layered movements of financial derivatives, creative accounting and unique business deals all come into play in a tough world economy.  Business leaders work overtime developing ways to protect their current financial interests.  They work overtime creating new ways to expand their opportunities to protect the money they currently manage.  As a result, protection policies surface at high rates of speed.  Every business 'fort' seems bent out of shape trying to find ways to protect what it has.  In all of this effort, things are not always as they seem.

Sometimes the overtime work to protect the funds a business manages becomes a silent obsession.  It creeps up into the management world without notice.  Before too long, the business decision-makers find the bulk of their monetary work surrounded by policies and exercises that include a long list of creative financing techniques.  Pick up any recent issue of the Wall Street Journal and take the time to open the pages to count the number of articles written that describe some occurrence of illegal, illicit or wrongful business process being reported.  Business publications on every newsstand are completely littered these days with reports of illegal creative financial business efforts.  The Wall Street Journal is not alone.  Bloomberg, Time, Fortune and many others...you name it they all have filled their internal pages reporting the illicit movement of money matters.

In one single Wall Street Journal issue I counted 38 articles written to report stories of illegal, illicit or wrongful financial activities of companies, leaders and officials.  Thirty eight articles describing what went wrong!  Thirty eight articles are written to describe who did what wrong to which group.  With a deeper review, in all of those articles it could be easily described how those business leaders worked hard to center their efforts on the subject of protecting their wealth.  In many business cases, protection policies work harder than growth policies.  Maybe that is why growth has become so hard to develop.  Maybe the decision-makers are spending too much time working on protection efforts and not enough time on innovation and consumer growth.  Maybe?

The level of illicit corporate policy movements may not be any larger than it was thirty years ago, but somehow I doubt it.  I recognize we have always had illicit monetary policies occur in the word of business long since before the day Christ walked this earth.  However, I doubt we have been able to be as heavily and personally affected by as much as we are in this particular day and age.  Levels of corporate wrongdoings committed today have fallen into my personal checkbook and daily life.  There are not many in the masses that are not negatively impacted by these illicit activities some corporate policy makers are dishing out.  The 'run' on wrongdoings is rising higher with each passing decade.  

In fact, just today the Wall Street Journal on the cover reports articles of distortion, crackdowns, leverage efforts, pardons and industry violations of consumer trust.  These are articles reporting how business has become the center of practicing unclean and unhealthy monetary fundamentals.  The world of business is layered in this kind of 'off-handed' activity.  That is why these publications report so many stories that surround these efforts of wrongdoings.

Things are not always as they seem.  The perception may be that corporate policies are trying to do well, but the public results are not buying that effort.  Too many business models hit the front page about back room deals and protective decisions that ignore the best interest of the consumer.  Corporate belief may actually think they are somehow working extra hard on winning the war for protecting their business strength.  However, that perception may not be as accurate as they would like to believe.  Many business leaders may be carrying the perception, 100%, that they are hired to work out how to protect the wealth their current business process is trying to maintain.  However, the consumer may be deeply considering a completely separate view.  The consumer may be arming their own buying attacks.  The consumer is producing a much more careful approach to the buying process they once performed so freely.  They trust no one, no more.

Here's the deal.  The consumer is having a tough time buying well without feeling the squeeze of life.  The consumer is losing confidence.  The consumer is noticing how it is becoming more difficult to win.  The levels of satisfaction felt by the consumer are beginning to take its long term toll.  And as a buyer, they are heading towards the 'don't care' attitude.  It is slowly becoming a process that hovers over the idea that surrounds the all for one, and one for all mentality.  Consumers are panning their buying process with a much more careful eye.  They are not afraid to sue, tweet, whistle-blow or picket.  The consumer is arriving near the level of buying procedures that haunts the halls of disgust and distrust.  They enter their world of buying with a much more careful eye.  In many cases, as they should.

There has never been a time when the phrase 'buyers beware' has become so true.  Just take a simple look at the protection of wealth policies in the drug and prescription industry, the financial institutions, the investment industry, the housing industry, the medical industry, add to them the permission of the technology wars for control and corporate dominance, the foreign policies of unfair and unhealthy tariffs, financial protection mandated by the government and its policies to force added monetary mandates onto the backs of consumers who are continually being asked to shoulder this overwhelming list of illicit burdens.  The consumer is running out of gas trying to keep up.  Business has created its own monster.  We have developed a monster that is likely devouring the limbs of our consumer.

Perception may be 100% in the corporate world.  Protection of wealth may be the work they perceive they need to do...but is it accurate?

Page two.

Let's Add Buying Ability To The consumer, Afford-ably!

When the consumer carries a burden of economy too large to hold, what will they do?  They will do what any heavy lifter will do.  They will drop it when it becomes too heavy to hold up.  It is simple math.  The consumer will slow their buying when their cost of living gets larger than the income they generate to use.  It is simple math.

Consumerism is an economy.  It is an industry.  In fact, consumerism is an economy that becomes this large umbrella over many other industries that depend upon the positive and fluid movement the consumers provide.  Does corporate business understand that the best policies for wealth protection comes directly delivered from the protection of fluid ability for the consumer to spend?  When corporate decisions thwart consumer victories, consumers drop their load.  It becomes too heavy to carry.  When government policies increase the weight of what the consumer must bear, consumers drop their load.  It becomes too heavy to carry.  This is simple math.

While the business world turns its focus on the efforts it plays to protect its shares, it must never forget to respect what the consumer can ultimately afford.  As each industry fights the fight to gain more consumer shares, they must recognize the balance that the consumer needs to honor in order to live a more fluid life.  With a more fluid life, the consumer can move about the market place and spend what the business world expects them to spend.  The movement of money will process itself at a respectable speed when the consumer is freely allowed to roam about the cabin and spend with confidence that is supported by the models they honor.

Every good idea comes to the life of reality with some added costs.  It takes a bit of money to make an idea float in reality.  Although many good ideas come to the table, not all of them can become able to float with the consumers funds.  Some good ideas will never become affordable to do.  That is not only a needed perception in this day and age; it is one of the most accurate ones omitted.  Some good ideas are simply not good math for the consumer to support.  Corporate and government engines may have easily forgotten this truth.  As this truth drifts further away from being seen, it permits the worlds of government and business policies to become more burdensome for the consumers to carry.  The consumerism industry receives a major crack in its foundation when this occurs.  The result will always be a slowing of the economy.

Gee, I wonder if our economy is slowing again.  It appears as though this may actually be true.  If so, is anyone looking to see what kind of load the consumer is carrying?  Is their load becoming too large to lift; again, already?  Think about this process.  It may seem complicated at first, but when broken down to children's terms; it is easy to see.  Consumers need a lighter load to carry.  The only way the consumer can continue to buy at an economic pace we desire, they must first receive deeper discounts for what they buy.  Why has it always been the retailers' responsibility to carry that burden to offer that discount?  Oops, have I finally hit the nail on the head?

Monetary policies roll along to protect the governments and corporate engines that produce the support systems of goods and services.  The stuff consumers want to buy.  If those engines pass on too much cost to the end user, the consumer, the end seller is by 'default' expected to balance out the difference of economic 'match' the consumer needs to have adjusted in order to buy.  During the past three decades, the pressure placed on this process is primarily the cause for the rise in continued vertical integration from the maker to the seller.  Makers can become the sellers, too.  This kind of marketing arrangement eliminates the costly process of paying an independent seller to do their retail thing as they independently hand over the items the consumers purchase.

For example, Apple does not desire to have "Terry's Tech" run a computer store to sell their IPods'.  It has the potential to increase the product cost to the consumer.  In order to remain competitive and sell a gob of products, Apple does not desire to share increased profits from those sales to consumers with anyone outside of their controlled environment of production.  It places their consumer's at a buying disadvantage when compared to other user-delivery options.

Vertical integration is in oil, accounting and consumer products.  It is happening everywhere.  The idea is to lower the consumer costs to increase product sales.  When the lawmakers work to face the fiscal cliff, will they take into consideration the rules of economy that govern consumerism procedures?  Every economic burden delivered to the consumer's hand will only deteriorate an already broken and very fragile consumer market.  When goods do not move quickly, the economy remains sicker.  Consumer support and the considerations that boost that process up will only help to increase what has been turning wrong for so very long.  Give the consumer less burdens, more abilities to spend and fresher opportunities to move about with their spending and everything else will eventually work out fine.  This is a perception that has gone to sleep, as accurate as it is.  

The rules to govern more, to tax more, to supply more services at a societal cost are the current perception of desire.  This perception is 100%.  We all want certain stuff provided for our useful benefit and passed onto our availability at an equal distribution of our neighbor's expense.  This kind of thinking is reaching a 100% level of perceptive view.  Perception is 100%, anyway, but is it accurate?

Help the consumers win.  That should be the next perspective desire.  It is the only one remaining accurate.

Until next time...