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Buoyed by a run on denim, sales of women's apparel rose 2.8 percent over the three months ending in February 2011, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. [...]

Last November, African-Americans watched two hours more television per day, on average, than the national average of 5 hours and 11 minutes, according to a report recently released by Nielsen, [...]

CORRECTION APPENDED Americans are spending about 20 percent more time consuming radio, television and the Internet than they were a decade ago, according to a survey by two media measurement [...]

Online shoppers are taking longer to research their purchases, according to a study of consumer behavior across 32 large online retailers. Rather than buy on impulse, they first use the [...]

Online video gained few viewers over the 12-month period ended Jan. 31. The number of people who watched videos online in January was only 3.1 percent higher than in January [...]

The quality of wireless phone calls, which improved steadily from 2003 to 2009, has hit a plateau, according to J.D. Power and Associates, the consumer ratings firm. One reason is [...]

Six times as many ads featured celebrities during this year's Oscar show as last year, according to GreenLight, a broker for celebrity endorsements. Many of those stars were heard but [...]

The average smartphone owner spends 667 minutes a month using apps. That is more time spent with apps than spent talking on a smartphone or using it to browse the [...]

Do celebrity endorsements work? The conventional wisdom is that they are moderately effective when properly used, though dangerous and even brand-destroying if the celebrity endorser suddenly becomes unpopular. That notion [...]

The total number of restaurants in the United States dropped nearly one percent from fall 2009 to fall 2010, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. That is [...]

On weekdays, users of smartphones frantically start to make calls and send text messages just as work gets out, according to Zokem, a research company that tracks mobile consumption. But [...]

The number of visitors to Web-based e-mail sites, like Gmail and Yahoo mail, declined 5.9 percent from November 2009 to November 2010, according to comScore, a firm that tracks Internet [...]

During the most recent holiday season, consumers who clicked on search ads, like those accompanying Google results, performed 87 percent more transactions with online retailers than they had a year [...]

For years, the willingness of Internet users to pay for information has been the subject of much anxiety, speculation and investment on the part of companies. A recent study finds [...]

Governmental agencies, labor unions and nonprofit groups bought 41.7 percent more radio spots in 2010 than they did in 2009. They were the fifth-largest buyers of radio time last year, [...]

Large retailers sent 15 percent more promotional e-mails per subscriber in 2010 than in 2009, according to Responsys, an online marketing firm. Responsys arrived at the figure by setting up [...]

In the last decade, researchers have begun to study the effects of anthropomorphizing an object -- finding, for example, that people cooperate better with humanlike robots. A study to be [...]

So-called location services like Foursquare or Gowalla seem ubiquitous. These services use a smartphone, often GPS-equipped, to broadcast the user's location, find friends nearby, and pick up deals or information [...]

High-definition televisions have entered American homes with startling speed; 56 percent of households now have at least some HD channels and an HD set, according to Nielsen. Among consumer technologies, [...]

When an Internet user in America sees a display ad online, the chances are now about one in four that the ad is published by Facebook, according to comScore, a [...]

How small is a ''small'' portion? No food chain quite agrees. A small soda at Long John Silver's, for example, is 20 ounces of liquid; a small at Pizza hut [...]

Over the last year, the rate of click fraud has risen drastically, reaching the highest rate since measurement began in 2006, according to Click Forensics, a firm that analyzes traffic [...]

Users of Facebook can download free applications, which allow them, for example, to play poker with friends or compare each other's taste in movies. The most popular of these applications [...]

The average teenager sends more than six text messages in every waking hour, according to Nielsen, which analyzed mobile phone usage by 13- to 17-year-olds from April to June this [...]

After watching an online video for a full minute, 44.1 percent of viewers will have clicked away, according to Visible Measures. But an outsize slice of that loss occurs in [...]

When people make numerical estimates, they are notoriously subject to the distorting influence of ''anchors'': numbers previously observed that linger in the mind and drag up or down the later [...]

Advertisers have long kept an uneasy eye on the incidence of multitasking among consumers of media. After all, a person who watches television while browsing the Web or cooking a [...]

When a new consumer product comes to market, both its brand name and its marketing tag line are the fruit of intense research. Consumers generally realize slogans are a marketer's [...]

In the last year, social networking services have nearly doubled in popularity among online Americans over 50, while they made virtually no inroads among those ages 18 to 29, according [...]

Most people do not think they need a television. Only 42 percent of Americans in 2010 said they felt that a television set was ''a necessity,'' according to a telephone [...]

Americans are both privacy-mad, yet blithely self-revealing online. We post all kinds of embarrassing information about ourselves, but periodically erupt in a rage when we feel that our online privacy [...]

The click fraud rate in the first quarter of 2010 was one of the highest on record, according to Click Forensics, a firm that analyzes traffic on behalf of advertisers [...]

Last year, people vastly increased the amount of time they spent watching television and browsing the Internet simultaneously, according to Nielsen. Looking only at people who used the technologies together [...]

It takes more clicks to be removed from an e-mail list than it once did, the online marketing firm Responsys says. In a study of 100 large online retailers, the [...]

It is a marketer's article of faith that the Internet is the best route to a teenager's cash. Marketers assume that teenage girls chatter about their favorite brands on Facebook [...]

Consumers filed 42 percent more complaints about banks last year than they did in 2008, according to the Council of Better Business Bureaus. That is a highly unusual rise in [...]

The proportion of children with cellphones has nearly doubled since 2005, an increase driven in large part by boys, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence, a market research company. Though [...]

Researchers have noticed that more than half of purchases are unplanned, but shoppers are still able to predict near-perfectly beforehand the amount they will spend. A new study, soon to [...]

Sending text messages from cellphones has shot past instant messaging from computers as a way for teens to communicate, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence, a market research company. Instant [...]

After three quarters of near-paralyzing caution, credit card issuers last quarter increased the number of offers they were sending out to American households. But last quarter's volume is still small [...]

When the history of coupons finally gets written, 1992 will go down as the Year of the Coupon, a time when consumers redeemed about 7.9 billion of them. But every [...]

Viewers remember ads that run near the beginning of the Super Bowl far better than later ads, according to an analysis by Nielsen IAG that combined viewer surveys from the [...]

In 2009, when an online ad was clicked by a computer in Vietnam, the odds were nearly even that the click was fraudulent. Web sites practice so-called click fraud by [...]

Researchers have known for 80 years about a symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the ''o'' in ''two'' make people think of large sizes, whereas people associate [...]

Two weeks before Christmas, online retailers blasted out promotional e-mail at a rate 60 percent higher than the yearly median. But in the seven days just before the holiday, the [...]

Companies are minisocieties, and employees can have impressions of a company that differ sharply from those of its potential customers. For the last decade or so, academics have suggested that […]

Only recently have companies begun assigning smells to everyday products: frangipani-scented sewing threads, tires that smell like roses. A paper soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research […]

The number of text messages transmitted in the United States grew by more than 80 percent over the 12 months ended in June, according to a report just released by […]

If there is a practical limit to the amount of television a child can watch, we have not yet discovered it. Nielsen reported last week that children ages 2 to […]

An article soon to be published in The Journal of Consumer Research explores the self-esteem among women looking at pictures of models. In one experiment, women with low body-mass measurements […]