Surely, Germans are market leaders when it comes to low-price bargain offers. Now, more and more retailers in Europe are following this trend as if they had nothing more to offer than rebates and reduced prices. When winter apparel is offered at 30% off already before the first snow, when perfumes are supposed to attract customers in dump bins outside store doors and toys are stacked in aisles at summer clearance sales prices at Christmas, where does this leave the value of giving? Looking at bargain shopping trips to Dubai or Singapore in high gloss magazines one could get the impression that mankind is in danger of perverting life.

Because energy costs are continuously rising and the government is wanting more money from its citizens because money is tight due to higher interest rates and harder to get credits, industry and retail think they have to stimulate sales, they have to create sales appeal or, as research institutes like to call it, they have to create a consumer friendly consumption climate.

Growth at any price! Or to put it even more precisely, growth at the cheapest price.

For years, a well-known retailer in Germany has called consumers scrooges, ‘crazy for greed’. Now they are saying that people ‘hate high prices’. Such slogans discredit the price/performance ratio. As if manufacturers and retailers are trying arbitrarily and irresponsibly, to do business with exorbitant and astronomical prices.

Time and again, we have warned in the past of destroying market culture and if we once again take up this issue, then it is simply due to our growing concern that damages could result which might be hard to repair and could possibly lead to devastating wildfires in the consumption landscape.

These days are used to put the final touches to business plans for the years 2008 and 2009. We suggest to meticulously balance any ‘bulk thinking’. Calculate prices with great diligence and caution. Forego calculation with a little ‘air’, but emphatically enforce prices on the market, because terms of the price also determine the customer. One has to know who one wants to serve. This applies to the industry as well as to retail. A customer who only buys price and the margin isn’t worth to be wooed. We have kept track on markets globally and for a long period of time and we predict for consumer goods markets in the First World signs of saturation leading to a leveling off sales curves and reduction of growth. This development cannot be halted with cheap prices. In order to protect ones business from losses there is only one solution, to disengage from ‘bulk thinking’.

Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about cutthroat competition, of all out price wars and other allegedly effective measures to assert oneself on the market at the expense of the competition. Competition have to be designed to be best. However, this can only be achieved from a position of strength and strength means to unconditionally focus on quality and quality has its price.

Don’t let anyone spoil your own personal pre-holiday mood but take a discerning look at the Sale-Sale-Sale hysteria. Take this opportunity to rethink your own strategies before implementation to ensure that the growth you are planning on is solidly grounded.