Zeno Group Blog

Wondering how this tough economy is really affecting consumer spending habits? To get a pulse on today’s consumer, Zeno Group’s Speaking Female Team went straight to those controlling the purse strings – US women. According to the US Census Bureau, women buy 81% of all products and services – who better than this powerful consumer group to give us insight into how spending habits are changing.

In this month’s Zeno Group She Report we offer an enlightening look into what women are thinking and doing when it comes to money. While most are cutting the family budget, women still need a vacation.

It’s been interesting to watch the debate over the stimulus package – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – play out in the media this week. One thing has been made abundantly clear: if you let others define your position, you lose. If not the overall debate, you certainly lose the battle for the media advantage.

While the legislation was being debated in the House, the administration was seemingly more focused on bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle than on convincing the public. While it’s valid to question whether media bias had a role in driving the focus on bipartisanship, at the end of the day, the Obama administration and Democrats on the Hill must take the lead in communicating the advantages of their legislation – and ensure their message reaches the American people.

Based on the flurry of network and cable interviews over the past 24 hours, it appears the administration has realized their error and recalibrated their message, along with their messengers. In an interview on Tuesday, Anderson Cooper asked the president on AC360 whether he’s “lost the message.” President Obama said no. Whether that is or isn’t the case remains to be seen.

As Congress was raking AIG’s executive team over the coals in an “oversight” hearing yesterday, it came to light that right after the federal government provided an $85 billion loan to bail out the company, AIG went ahead with an “incentive” trip for top sales guys. The cost (to shareholders, which now includes taxpayers) was $440,000 and included first class accommodations, spa treatments, and other excessively extravagant behavior.

You wonder if AIG management has intentionally decided to ignore the fact that executive benefits – from big bonuses to lavish perquisites to massive golden parachutes – have become the most obvious symbol of what is wrong with Wall Street firms. While defenders of these firms correctly argue that executive pay is hardly a significant cause of the current crisis, it’s an obvious and easy target for politicians and pundits.

Yet, as the market drop sucks $2 trillion out of American’s retirement savings, AIG has given their myriad critics – which include shareholders, advocacy groups, the White House, and especially the news media – a sharp stick with which to flog them even more. Perhaps they figure their reputation is so damaged it can’t get any worse.

That attitude won’t encourage AIG shareholders, policy holders and the taxpayers, and it certainly doesn’t play well with Washington regulators. Let’s hope this is just an extraordinary lack of political and public relations judgment by senior management in a time of crisis, and not a thumbing of their noses to the very people who must bear the burden of their poor corporate stewardship.

Like many of us with money in the market, I tuned into CNBC this morning to assess the damage after reading about all the turmoil over the weekend. Jim Cramer said something that caught my attention. When asked what brought about the current environment of a bankrupt Lehman Brothers, the problems at AIG and the impending sale of Merrill Lynch, he did not say is was a failure of regulation or oversight or law.

He said it was a failure of disclosure.

The primary reason that Lehman was unable to find a buyer, said Cramer, was that it had massive amounts of debt and other obligations that the market did not know about. And once this information came out they were cooked.

From a public trust point of view it does not matter what business you are in or what size you are. What matters is that you are transparent in all your actions and that you effectively communicate them to all stakeholders.

It ought not take the demise of a major American financial institution to remind us in the business of communication how critical this is, but it certainly makes the point.

If you thought sending out a press release with a typo was bad, imagine creating a financial panic at the world’s second-largest airline by erroneously sending a six-year old news story out on the wires. The series of events that lead to a 75 percent drop in United Airlines’ stock Monday underscore how critical it is for news services and wires to independently verify information that they send to subscribers. In this instance, Bloomberg received a six-year old story from reading service Income Securities regarding United Airlines filing for Chapter 11. Neither Bloomberg nor Income Securities independently verified the story’s timeliness after it was apparently miscoded by a Google News bot.

The Tribune Company (the source of the original story), Google, Income Securities and Bloomberg all had a hand in this and the investigation into who is most at fault is ongoing. The end result could be increased checks and procedures when wires send out critical financial information.